


Vena Cava

by SilentAuror



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, HLV fix-it, His Last Vow, His Last Vow fix-it, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, M/M, POV John Watson, Romance, Series 3, Set during His Last Vow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 11:48:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentAuror/pseuds/SilentAuror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has been shot in the chest; John has been shot in the heart. Though everything is broken, they do their best to heal the wounds that Mary left on them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vena Cava

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Vena Cava- TŁUMACZENIE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3524540) by [Toootie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toootie/pseuds/Toootie)
  * Translation into Polski available: [Vena Cava- TŁUMACZENIE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3524540) by [Toootie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toootie/pseuds/Toootie)
  * Translation into Русский available: [Полая вена](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7210619) by [Bothersome_Arya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bothersome_Arya/pseuds/Bothersome_Arya)



**Vena Cava**

 

 **vena ca•va**  
 _n. pl._ **venae ca•vae** (kā′vē)  
Either of the two large veins that drain blood from the upper body and from the lower body and empty into the right atrium of the heart.

Latin: _vena_ : vein + _cava_ : hollow

*

Asystole. 

The worst possible prognosis. John feels as though something in him just died at the uninterrupted beep of the electrocardiogram. This is a nightmare; his sense of reality is nowhere to be found. He’s gone through all of the correct motions but it’s as though his mind has absented itself, completely unable to do anything other than flee like water from oil from any coherent thoughts about this. He dialled emergency services. He stayed with Sherlock, said all the correct things, helped the paramedics load him into the ambulance. Steadied the oxygen mask on his face. Has pressed himself to the glass of the operating theatre to watch. CPR, CPR, CPR, CPR. Sherlock is not responding. John’s eyes move between the electrocardiogram and Sherlock’s still face. His eyes are moving behind his lids; there is brain activity. But he is flatlining, going into asystole. 

It’s as though something has reached into John’s own chest with a fist and squeezed ruthlessly, relentlessly. Heedless of some tiny inner voice shrieking _Stop help I can’t you’ll kill me I can’t stop this now_. Killing him. John’s hands are cold yet sweating, leaving smudges on the window as he watches Sherlock’s motionless body on the operating table and feels as though he is the one dying. It’s been hours. It feels like hours. He’s lost all sense of time, doesn’t even know what time it was when they got here. Some part of his mind knows that he should text Mary but he can’t look away long enough to do that. Something might change, might happen, and if it does, he needs to be there for it. There is no question about this. If Sherlock somehow revives – and this is a hope to which he cannot even admit to himself how desperately he is clinging – he needs to be there. He’ll be disoriented. Surrounded by strangers. Weak, and if he survives this (he _has_ to, he must, he cannot possibly leave John again) he’ll be on morphine, loads of it, or else the very pain will send him back into shock. 

John wants to go in there and take over. He knows they won’t stand for it; they sternly informed him that he could not be inside the operating theatre, reminded him that he doesn’t work there and that it is concession enough that they have allowed him to be there in the observation room. He knows in his mind that he would tire after four hours of CPR himself, but he could still try, could contribute. Take it in turns with the other doctors, the way they are. Asystole: the dreaded, the state from which the vast majority of cardiac arrests don’t come back. (But Sherlock _has_ to come back, he _has_ to.) 

The doctors finally concede defeat. They are exhausted and grey-faced to the last, and the asystole is not reversing; Sherlock has been flatlining for hours. They are giving up on him and moving away. In most cases it’s only a matter of time before the brain activity stops and the patient is declared officially dead. Someone stops by where John is standing and quietly says that he may go inside and wait, if he wants to. They know he’s a doctor. They know he doesn’t need to be told what this means, or what he’s waiting for. Sherlock’s heart has stopped – stopped hours ago, kept going only by CPR, and when even that failed to keep it going, there was nothing else to be done. But John is permitted to wait with what they are assuming will soon be a corpse. Donated to science, organs and tissues and brain dissected and analysed, the way Sherlock would have liked. It’s probably a stipulation in his will that a minimum IQ level be required for anyone performing research on his remains. If he has a will. For a second that seems to take his stupefied brain ages, John contemplates whether or not Sherlock has ever written a will. He always lived like someone who never expected to die, yet threw himself recklessly into death’s path countless times per week. Sometimes per day. 

The last of the doctors is pulling his mask down and rolling off his bloodied gloves, disposing of them in the biohazardous waste bin. John stares at Sherlock’s unmoving form, the intubation feed still forcing air into his lungs, keeping the body as alive as it can be made to be, and in that instant pays a thousand times over for everything he has never said, not to himself and certainly not to Sherlock. All of those things that he transformed into anger or annoyance or dry humour, all of those times that Sherlock caused him so much worry that he reacted the way an angry parent does. Never saying, instead, _Don’t DO that to me, I care about you so much, don’t you KNOW that yet?_ The things that they don’t say and now, John thinks, will never say. His mouth forms Sherlock’s name but no sound comes out. 

He needs a miracle. A real one this time. Not a trick, nothing that can be explained away with _thirteen possible solutions_. Not this time: Sherlock was shot in the inferior vena cava, through the liver. A shot nearly guaranteed to result in death. It’s science. It’s biology. It’s only logical. Sherlock himself would have agreed. He will almost certainly die. John’s brain puts out this fact in plain black lettering in front of his eyes. Arial font, ten-point. Sherlock will certainly die. The letters blur and dissolve; he cannot accept them.

But then, as though in response to his inability or refusal (John isn’t even sure which it is), a miracle does happen: Sherlock’s finger moves. It has to be a mistake, false hope, but his breath catches in his lungs and can’t seem to find its way out again. No – there it is again. John says his name, aloud this time, and it catches the remaining doctor’s attention. He turns, sees it, and then there is a flurry of motion. Sherlock’s fingers are twitching, which John can just see through the bustling of bodies around the table, and then his eyes open. Breath exudes from his lips with the faintest of vocalisations, and John is shattered with relief. (Sherlock could still die, he reminds himself. But he woke up. That’s all that matters: there’s hope now. And only now can John allow himself to realise that there really _wasn’t_ hope before.) 

Eventually the doctors have Sherlock stabilised and stitched up. They replace the tube in his mouth with a nasal oxygen pump and leave him to rest. Someone comes by to tell John that he can go in now, so he goes into the operating theatre at last. They’ve turned off the overhead lights, leaving only the softer glow of incandescent lamps around the edges of the circular chamber. He finds a chair in the corner and pulls it over to the bed, still feeling as though this isn’t really happening. His body is trembling in shock, fatigue, and emotion, most of which is relief, but there’s more there that he doesn’t want to look at just now. The room is extremely quiet, just the humming of various machines. It feels like all of his muscles have turned to water. Now that he is sitting, after hours of standing in tensed, rigid suspension, he doesn’t think he could stand again if someone held a gun to his head. Guns. He doesn’t know who shot Sherlock, doesn’t have the first idea. Security guard? But no, they’d have taken Sherlock away, not shot him. This is the only theory John’s numb, useless brain has provided and otherwise he’s been busy worrying about whether Sherlock would live or die, frankly. 

As John sits there in the darkened room, listening to the oxygen passing, induced, through Sherlock’s respiratory system, there is a quiet that seeps through him, right down to the bone. It is the first time since Sherlock’s return that he’s been inescapably confronted with everything he has refused to think about in detail since Sherlock’s return ten months ago. Besides the moment with the bomb on the train, John has chosen steadfastly, again and again, to focus on the matter at hand, chosen to be glad that Sherlock is back and not overanalyse anything. As the media hubbub died down, they’d spent loads of time together, of course. There was a long dinner at Angelo’s to quietly celebrate Sherlock’s return, just the two of them, and Sherlock had told him in great detail and at length about why he’d jumped, how he’d survived, where he’d been ever since. How and why he’d come back when he had. John had asked for all sorts of extra details. But he hadn’t asked the hard questions. How much longer Sherlock would have stayed away had Mycroft not infiltrated the Serbian terrorist ring. What he’d expected or hoped regarding John when he’d come back. He never said anything about Mary, had seemingly already known of her existence (he’d been wholly unsurprised by her in the restaurant, at any rate), accepted the fact of her presence without comment. John wondered, though. Now the unasked questions come back unavoidably. After the beginning, they’d jumped right back into the work, Sherlock’s work. Their work. Cases, rooftop chases, mysteries, Lestrade and New Scotland Yard all over again, take two. There hadn’t been time for introspection, or, it had seemed, need. Sherlock had accepted without question that John lived where he lived, had never said anything whatsoever about John moving back into Baker Street. John wonders now again if Sherlock had been hoping for that, to come back and find everything and everyone unchanged and ready to pick up where they’d left off. Only it wasn’t a question of _everyone_. What Lestrade and Mrs Hudson and Molly and the rest did in their day-to-day lives hardly affected Sherlock’s life. It was John that mattered. He knew that. He knew that being engaged and having moved out and moved on had to have affected Sherlock somehow, but he’d never said and John had never brought it up. 

And what about him? In the heavy quiet of the room, John feels again the conflict he’s pushed down as far as he could, out of the light of day, out of the reach of casual question. If he’d known Sherlock was coming back, would he have chosen to move on? He’d really had to. After a year and a half, he’d known it was enough. The grieving process has to end. He’d started a new job, started working full time again, and Mary was there, waiting. He could have been so happy, free of Sherlock to interfere, requiring him at all hours of the day or night, free to pursue a peaceful life with Mary with a guaranteed one hundred percent fewer eyeballs in the fridge. It was ridiculous that he would find himself checking for them again, once Sherlock came back. (Missing them?) Possibly. John isn’t an idiot; he knows that he has never in his life desired to have human remains next to the produce. It’s Sherlock he misses, and that’s natural, isn’t it? He’d always told himself to be glad that Sherlock was back, glad that he was apparently content to let John have this particular relationship without getting petulant or possessive as he always had in the past. Sherlock himself was quieter, less frenetic (most of the time; the height of a case was always subject to exceptions to that particular rule), and knew better than to call at two in the morning. In the old days he wouldn’t have hesitated, calling up the stairs to John’s room, or simply barging in if John hadn’t responded in what he considered an acceptable margin of time. John assumed it was that he was really trying to respect John’s choice, his choice to be with Mary, his choice to sleep when other people slept now, though he couldn’t know that John doesn’t sleep all that well a lot of the time. Perhaps, he thought, he’d always slept so well during those days at Baker Street because he was either starved for sleep while on cases or geared to take advantage of it while he could, never knowing when the next case would arise, or how. Regardless, the fact remains: he still missed Sherlock. It should have been enough that he was back from the dead, or the presumed dead at least. Enough that he’s back in John’s life. They are friends. Best friends. John has never in his life had a friend he’s this close to. 

In the days before, especially once Irene Adler had disrupted their lives so badly, he’d been forced to question himself, in the absolute privacy of his own thoughts, of what precisely their friendship meant to him. He’s never been as close to any of his girlfriends as he was to Sherlock back then, which is a ridiculous thought: these were women he’d cared about very much, sometimes even loved, yet none of them had inspired the sense of addiction he had to Sherlock, the absolute devotion. It was Sherlock’s charisma, he knows. No one was ever fully immune to it, no matter how rude Sherlock was to them all. And he’d seemed equally dependant on John. No: not dependant. But he wanted John there in a way he never wanted anyone else. That had seemed to surprise Sherlock as much as it did John at first, and then Sherlock had apparently just decided to accept it, take it for granted. He’d told John, during that long dinner, just once toward the end, that he’d missed him. 

“Really?” John had asked. “You weren’t too busy dismantling crime rings and terrorist cells on your own, playing Bond?” 

Sherlock had smiled and then frowned. “No, John,” he’d said, as though John had said something particularly dense. “ _You’ve_ always been the Bond of the two of us. Of course I missed you. I always miss you when you’re not there.”

John had been startled by the rush of warmth that came to his chest and face at this, but responded lightly. “No one to toss you a pen when you want one?”

“No,” Sherlock had said, clearly aiming for levity himself. “Or to steal dessert from.” He’d snuck another forkful of John’s cheesecake then, smiling from beneath his lashes in that way that always made John forgive him instantly. It was reprehensible. He should work on that, he’d thought again then, already knowing it was impossible. It was Sherlock. It was impossible not to love him, even when he was being an utter dick. 

Perhaps an hour has gone by now. John’s own thoughts echo in his head: _It’s impossible not to love him even now, when he’s gone and got himself shot, the bastard._ He knows very well that he loves Sherlock. Of course he does. He has from the start. Their friendship saved him, brought him back to life, whetted his interest in living again. Sherlock literally cured him, body and mind. And Sherlock loves him, and there’s never been any need to question it, analyse it, pick it apart and put it in a box. _Best friends_ seems like a safe label. It’s a label that leaves space for them to be close, space for John to be with Mary and call that exactly what it is. She’s his wife and he loves her. And Sherlock and Mary have both let him keep the other, neither staging any sort of territory war: their territory doesn’t overlap. Except how John can’t live with both of them. He doesn’t want that, a trio. He wants to have what he has with each of them, but separately. Of course it’s convenient that they get along, and naturally the three of them spend a lot of time together, but what he really likes is spending time with each of them on their own. Sherlock and Mary are united because of him. He knows that. Somehow Sherlock didn’t interfere this time, didn’t sabotage it but just accepted it from the start. And Mary knew who Sherlock was, and had always seemed pleased for John that he’d got his best friend back from the seeming dead. They tacitly accepted each other for his sake. It’s a friendship that only exists because they both understand that it makes John’s life easier. They’ve never made him choose. 

So then, why is it so difficult to sit here by Sherlock’s side and feel nothing but doubt and recrimination echoing through his mind? All of the grief and anger that had surged through him upon Sherlock’s return has come back, and at the heart of it all is his fear of losing Sherlock again. He cannot live through that a second time, and what does _that_ say about him? Isn’t that too close, for people who are friends, even best friends?

Sherlock’s hand is white and still on the sheets beside him. Without thinking, John reaches out and takes it in both of his, gently so as not to disturb Sherlock’s rest. He’s still in recovery; when he’s stable he’ll be moved to a room. There are no rails on the table, nothing to get in the way. His hand is cool and limp between John’s warmer ones. He can’t even put words to this. It’s not as though he’s afraid that Sherlock will hear; even if he does, so what? They’ve literally said that they love each other already, Sherlock rather spectacularly so, in a room full of witnesses. It wasn’t something John had ever, _ever_ thought to hear Sherlock say. It was one thing for _him_ to say it: the fact of his impending wedding made that completely safe territory, established it as a strictly platonic statement, whereas Sherlock… the jury was still out on whether Sherlock Holmes was gay, straight, completely asexual, or too inexperienced to even know. For him to make a public declaration of love wherein he equated himself directly with the bride would have been tremendously awkward if it hadn’t been so amazing, so moving that he’d felt tears spring to his eyes. Mary had called it cute, later, on the honeymoon. It had annoyed John tremendously, and he’d said something a bit short. It hadn’t been _cute_ , it had been profoundly meaningful. It meant a staggering amount to John and still does. It _had_ been funny, particularly Sherlock’s perplexed reaction to the entire room having been moved to tears, and somehow that made it all the more touching, that he hadn’t had the first notion of what a ridiculous and awkward thing it had been to say, nor how deeply it had affected John. And John wasn’t stupid, either; he hadn’t missed all the self-deprecating stuff Sherlock had said about essentially not being worthy of his friendship and giving him, ever so nobly, to Mary. He hadn’t forgotten that, just never knew what to say to it. There hadn’t been anything he _could_ say. He’d said what he could about trying to tell Sherlock that nothing would change. 

Only everything had already changed before that: John wasn’t at Baker Street. There was no arguing over why that container of organ flesh was in the jar at the back of the fridge, whose turn it was to do the washing up or go to the shops to get some food in the flat. There was no more violin at three in the morning, no appearances of Sherlock at the foot of his bed at dawn to ask some deep-seated philosophical question that may or may not have had bearing on a current case. No Sherlock hovering over his shoulder and pointing out his typos or incorrect grammar usages while he was typing a blog entry, nothing of their domestic partnership in general. And there were a host of other things that had filled their place: dinners with other couples, games nights, staff parties and nudge-wink comments about how everyone knew that John and Mary were bound to get together from the start. People who made him feel normal, like he’d made the right and completely reasonable choice. It had never been a choice, though; no one had ever sat John down and said, _Look mate, you’ve got two options here. You’ve got this wonderful woman, Mary Morstan. You can work with her, marry her, maybe start a family together, get a cozy flat in the suburbs, learn to drive and get a car. Or option two, you get your best friend back. Life at Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes. Adrenaline and stimulating arguments and dinner eaten at midnight. Just pick one, though._ He’d never made a conscious choice: he’d already chosen before Sherlock came back. It was too late. He’d done everything in his power to make as much space as he could to have Sherlock in his life again. But it wasn’t the same. He’d pre-chosen Mary and no one had ever told him in time that there was going to be a second option if he’d waited. It wasn’t quite fair – to either of them, he thinks rebelliously, sometimes. Not often. But sometimes, in the heart of the night while he’s lying awake next to Mary, he wishes he’d been given a little more say in the matter. 

He has no idea now what – who – he would have chosen. But something aches in him now, something that feels a lot like the old grief, after Sherlock’s death. The sleepless nights of pain drilling down to his core, dry-eyed and wishing he could cry. Or the weeks when he couldn’t stop crying and throwing things and screaming his rage to the dark. When he would have given anything, _anything_ just to get Sherlock back. And now it so easily could have happened again, and all of the things that had never happened, save in the darkest recesses of John’s imagination, could have never happened all over again. The things which Irene’s presence had drawn too close to the surface, provoking his jealousy and showing him it was there to be provoked. Suggesting in her slimy, insidious, condescending tones, the things that John sometimes, extremely rarely, almost never, but _sometimes_ thought of in the darkest parts of the night, regarding Sherlock. Things he never would have suggested or initiated, but sometimes he’d wondered if, in the right set of circumstances, would have just… come up. If Sherlock would have said something, done something. Looked at him in a particular way. It had never happened, though, because Sherlock had died, leaving John to wonder for a year and a half what would have happened if they had kept going that way. How much closer could they have come if Sherlock’s death hadn’t interrupted so finally? How much, before something had to give and _friends_ didn’t cover it any more. Before the shadowy, theoretical things had manifested themselves physically, in a touch that lingered too long, in mutual questioning in each other’s eyes? 

It’s a question that never needed asking, though, because when Sherlock came back, Mary was there. Mary: safe, gentle, loving, normal Mary, whose very existence unknowingly kept all the lines where they belonged. And yet, as John sits there, alone in the dark, the conflict persists. The grief. The unanswered yearning. The love. Call it what it is: he loves Sherlock. He does. Always has done, and always will. He bows his head in defeat, forehead touching his hands where they’re holding Sherlock’s. 

Sherlock stirs. Startled, John looks up. Sherlock’s brow is knit, lips moving, but he’s not speaking. Or waking, John thinks. Not yet. He looks over at a digital clock on the wall. Five fifty-three in the morning. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s been sitting there in the dark with Sherlock. Maybe two hours now. “Sherlock,” he says, just above a whisper. 

Sherlock’s eyes are closed. “John,” he says very faintly, almost lost in the sound of the oxygen flowing over his lips. 

“I’m here,” John says, his voice rough. He tightens his hands. “I’m here and I’m not leaving. Don’t you dare leave me. Not again.”

“John,” Sherlock says again, his forehead troubled. “I’m… still here…”

He isn’t fully awake, his eyes closed, but the response seems to be the exact wrong (or right?) thing for him to have said; suddenly John is weeping without realising he started. It’s exactly what he needed to be told, or the wrong pressure point to press if they (whoever they were) were hoping that John would keep it together. He puts his forehead down on their joint hands and cries, and the release of the pent-up emotion is the best thing he could have asked for. 

“John,” Sherlock’s voice says, still weak but much more alertly. “John!”

John lifts his wet face. Sherlock’s eyes are open. “Hey,” he manages, shoulders shuddering with relief, the tears receding. Sherlock is awake. He’s really going to be all right. 

Sherlock looks confused; his hand moves between John’s and he looks down the length of his own body to see it caught there. He doesn’t pull it away, but his eyes travel back to John’s. “John,” he says again, his voice low, hoarse from having been intubated. “The oxygen – take – ”

“Oh – of course,” John says. He gets to his feet, legs still trembling and weak, and bends over Sherlock. The cannula can be uncomfortable once the patient has started to breathe on his own again. (The patient. Why is he reverting to strictly medical terminology in his head? It’s Sherlock.) He lifts the pump away from Sherlock’s nose and watches carefully to make sure that he is breathing autonomously. “You okay?” he asks, still bent over Sherlock. 

Sherlock makes a sound that’s neither here nor there and moves his right hand within John’s. “John,” he says again, as though it’s the only thing he is capable of saying. He’s disoriented but lifts his left hand and clumsily touches John’s tear-wet cheek. His eyes find John’s, confused but there’s something else there, something open and vulnerable and wanting. “You,” he says, but can’t seem to finish what he’s trying to say. 

The tears, John thinks. He’s questioning why John was crying. Of course he would. “I was so worried,” he says softly. Sherlock doesn’t respond verbally but his eyes are on John’s, silently asking something, and John doesn’t even want to say no, deny him anything right now. Not even this, if it’s what he thinks it is. He puts his left hand on Sherlock’s forehead, still bent over him. His face is perhaps six inches from Sherlock’s, so it’s an easy thing to close the space, slowly, put his mouth on Sherlock’s. He doesn’t think about it first, just acts on instinct, and he is kissing Sherlock. After all that time debating and avoiding engaging in active thoughts of this, it wasn’t difficult at all. It was the most natural, obvious thing in the world, and who would have thought that? There’s no conflict about this. It’s so simple; it’s the only thing he could have done just now. He loves Sherlock and Sherlock very nearly died – _did_ die; they were only waiting for his brain activity to stop – but somehow he survived and John’s relief shuffles his priorities briskly. This is all that matters right now, that Sherlock is alive and that John loves him fiercely, needs this kiss like he needs oxygen. Sherlock is kissing back, fingers moving very slightly against John’s. He’s so weak he can barely move, yet his lips have tightened against John’s. The kiss is very soft, very gentle, and after a moment John lets it end. He licks his lips and stays where he is for a moment, leaning over Sherlock. Sherlock is looking up into his eyes with an unguarded yet pained expression that John has only seen in glimpses before – just ghosts of it before Sherlock normally closes off his face, so quickly that John could never tell, later, whether they had ever happened. But now he can see it plainly. It’s obvious, even to him. 

He strokes Sherlock’s forehead. “Don’t ever leave me again,” he whispers. “I can’t lose you again. I couldn’t… Just… don’t. You understand? Don’t.”

Sherlock blinks and touches his tongue to his lips. “Never,” he whispers back. A spasm crosses his face. “God,” he breathes with difficulty, his torso stiffening. 

The pain has got to be absolutely incredible. This thought brings John back into focus. “Just wait,” he murmurs. “I’ll get someone to get you something for the pain. I’ll be right back.”

“John – ” He turns back. Sherlock has closed his eyes again. “Thank you. You…” His voice fades away. He’s drifting. 

He doesn’t say what he’s thanking John for, and John decides not to ask. “Of course,” he says. “I’ll be back.” He goes to the nurses’ station and tells them to bring a morphine pump, now. When he gets back to the room, Sherlock has fallen asleep again. John gently slides the cannula back into place and sits down, taking Sherlock’s hand again. Hand-holding can be very therapeutic for a patient with this level of injury, he reminds himself. As though justifying it. John closes his eyes and for the first time in hours, thinks of sleep. He is absolutely not going to think about this until later. Much later. 

***

He wakes a couple of hours later and it’s a different world. He’s tired but the nightmarish and then dreamy quality of the night has evaporated in the bright light of day. The supervising physician has come into the theatre; Sherlock’s life signs have stabilised and they’re moving him to a private room. John follows them, stumbling in fatigue. A time check shows that it’s just after eight in the morning. He should really text Mary; he’s been gone all night and she’ll have no idea where he is or what’s happened. First he follows the gurney into Sherlock’s newly-assigned room and watches them get him settled in. He’s blinking dimly, thick-tongued and tired. One of the nurses gives him an understanding smile and kindly tells him that he’s welcome to have a kip in the next bed, where he’ll be nearby and able to keep an eye on Sherlock. He asks drowsily, hand already on the rails, if Sherlock can have visitors. 

“Not until eleven at the earliest,” she tells him firmly. “And only if he’s up to it. Family and close friends only.”

“Right,” John mumbles, the urge to sleep hitting hard. He makes himself go into the corridor and texts Mary. _Bad news: Sherlock was shot last night. It’s bad. He’s stable but it was a very close call. He went into asystole, but he actually came out of it. He woke briefly two hours ago but he’s out again. I’m with him at the Royal London. No visitors until eleven. Meet me here around then? Sorry I couldn’t call._ He presses _send_ and is back in the room and getting into the bed before he knows it. His phone battery is low, but there should be enough for when Mary texts back. Sherlock is sleeping soundly, drugged to the gills in the next bed. He was always a quiet sleeper but John almost wishes he would make a bit more sound, just to show that he’s still there. But it’s fine. When Sherlock wakes next, he’ll be all right. John closes his eyes and lets both sleep and relief wash over him like a wave. 

***

He wakes again a few of hours later; there was some noise in the corridor that penetrated his consciousness. That’s good. He only wanted a nap, anyway; otherwise he’d prefer to be keeping an eye on Sherlock, who is still asleep. John goes into the loo and splashes cold water on his face, rubbing his hand over the rough new stubble. He looks grey and tired, the lines and bags under his eyes deeper than ever, but it doesn’t matter. Sherlock is alive. He checks his phone and there’s a text from Mary. It’s short, shorter than it should be, given what he told her. All it says is, _All right, see you about 11, then. What’s the room number?_ John frowns at the message. Shouldn’t she sound more surprised? It’s not as though Sherlock gets shot every day. John certainly has sent messages before along the lines of _In gaol for the night, sorry, Sherlock said the wrong thing to someone and we’re waiting on Greg to come and spring us. See you after work_ or _Locked in a cold storage unit with Sherlock, be late for supper. Help is coming, don’t worry. Sorry._ But it’s not as though Sherlock nearly dies, _really_ nearly dies this time, every night. Maybe she was just in a hurry when she sent it. Maybe she always figured Sherlock would get himself shot eventually. John hadn’t even told her where he was going, just said that Sherlock needed him for something, and Mary had said, “Yeah, he asked if we were busy tonight and I said you were free,” and there hadn’t been any other details. Still, it’s Sherlock, though. She knows what his work is like. She’s watched John apply plasters to his (own) arms and face because of it often enough, even giggled through him awkwardly stitching up a gash on his leg once. She’d offered to help but he’d always preferred to do it himself and she never argued. 

He texts her the room number now and says he’ll see her soon. It’s quarter to eleven now. He goes over to Sherlock’s bed. He’s unchanged, still breathing evenly with the cannula in place, his vital signs steady. 

“Dr Watson?” He looks up; it’s the nurse who’d said he could stay last night. She smiles at him. “He’s doing well,” she confirms. “Did you get some sleep?”

“Yeah, I did, thanks,” John says. He smiles. “Thanks for letting me stay.”

“Of course,” she says, waving it off. “Who’s Mary?” she asks. 

John feels his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “What?”

The nurse lifts her own brows. “He said the name ‘Mary’ when he first revived last night. I just wondered if it was his wife or girlfriend or something. I assume you’ll have let everyone know, though. I was just curious.”

He said Mary’s name? John is still frowning. Why would he have done that? This isn’t sitting well, not at all. “Mary is _my_ wife,” he says, and it comes out more harshly than he meant. 

The nurse backs off rapidly. “Oh,” she says. “Okay. Well – erm – if you need anything, just let us know, all right?”

“Yeah,” John says, already feeling badly. “Thanks. I will.” He checks the time again, and looks at Sherlock’s face before going to meet Mary. For one guilty moment he lets himself think of the kiss, which feels like something that happened in a dream now. He wonders if Sherlock will remember it, and if so, what he’ll think about it. Never mind now. In the meantime, he’ll just deny it ever happened, if it comes up. That kiss belongs in the realm of hazy half-realities, of thoughts kept in the back of the mind and never acted upon. Sherlock is on plenty of morphine; even he probably wouldn’t be able to say whether or not it actually happened. John goes out to find Mary. 

He sees her on the stairs and says her name. 

She looks up, sees him. “Hey!”

John beams at her, suddenly relieved that she’s there and that he has someone else to share this with. She loves Sherlock; she’ll be relieved that he’s okay. “He’s only bloody woken up,” he says. “He’s pulled through!”

Mary smiles, but looks uneasy. “Really? Seriously?”

She actually sounds disbelieving. Is that because Sherlock only just woke now, or because he survived at all? Maybe she didn’t realise how serious it was. Or perhaps she called ahead and asked about the shot; it _was_ completely unlikely that anyone could have survived a shot to the inferior vena cava. She’s a nurse; she knows that. He decides not to ask, bringing up the other thing that’s bothering him ever so slightly instead. “And you, Mrs Watson,” he says, pointing at her, “you’re in big trouble.”

Her expression becomes guarded, confused. “Really? Why?”

“His first word when he woke up?” John prompts, as if she should know this. “Mary!”

She laughs as though this is the funniest thing he’s ever said, which is reassuring, so he joins in. Of course there’s nothing going on there. Despite Janine, Sherlock is about as asexual as it gets. He hugs her and feels better about everything. 

Before they go into the room, she stops and takes a good, long look at him, her face becoming concerned. “Darling, don’t mind me saying, but you look _awful_. Did you sleep at all?” 

“A bit,” John says. “They let me kip in the next bed. I got a couple of hours in.”

“Are you planning to stay?” she asks. “Not going to work today?”

“No,” John tells her. How is that even a question? “Sherlock was _shot_ ,” he says, as though she didn’t understand that on the first go-round. “Of course I’m staying with him. I mean, we don’t even know who shot him, not that I’ve given it much thought yet. I’m not leaving him. And he only _just_ made it. He was flatlining. For _hours_. I thought we had lost him.”

Mary reaches up and strokes his face. “Of course,” she says, understanding completely. “And of course you should stay with him. But if you’re going to stay awake, you’d better get a coffee or something. I’ll stay with him while you go. You can get me one, too. I was at the clinic at eight-thirty, like always. I could do with one.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” John says. “I’ll just go down to the cafeteria, then. Be right back.”

Mary smiles at him and watches him go. He glances up partway down the stairs to see that she’s still watching him, her expression fond. 

***

Mary is standing in the doorway of Sherlock’s room when he gets back with their coffees, watching Sherlock as he sleeps. “Oh! John!” she says as he comes up behind her and says her name. She turns and accepts the cup he hands her, smiling her thanks. “Look, I’m sorry, I’d stay with you but I’ve got to get back to the clinic, I told Carol I’d only be an hour or two. It’s busy today without you, so they’re a bit swamped. He’s not awake anyway – sure you can’t come with me?”

John glances over her shoulder at Sherlock’s still form. “No, I can’t,” he says. (He thought they’d already established this.) “I’m staying put. But go ahead, I understand.”

“He won’t wake anyway,” Mary says with a shrug. “They’ve got him good and drugged. I read the chart though, and he’s going to be fine. But suit yourself.”

“Okay,” John says. “I’ll see you later, then.” He bends forward and kisses her cheek. She squeezes his arm and goes, and John goes back to the chair. It isn’t even warm. Did Mary stand the whole time, then? Odd. He checks Sherlock’s morphine and the dial is all the way up. Is it really necessary for it to be _that_ high? Possibly he should alert the staff to the fact of Sherlock’s opiate addiction, though it’s not likely that would change anything, not within hours of the shot. He does need it. He supposes that if they set it that high, they think he needs it. It’s a patient-controlled pump; he can’t overdose on it. And Sherlock is _their_ patient, technically. Probably better not to have John and his personal doubts about the dosage in charge after all. That _is_ the reason why doctors aren’t suppose to treat people they know. He knows that.

He sips his coffee and settles in to watch over Sherlock. Hours later, as the shadows are settling over the room, he remembers to text Mary to say that he’s staying overnight again. She doesn’t respond. 

***

The headlines the next morning are surprising, to say the least. Apparently Janine had her own game going on all the while. He wonders if that was an open arrangement between her and Sherlock all along, and if so, why Sherlock didn’t tell him, let him think there was something going on between them. All that, in the sitting room. Was Sherlock just trying to make him squirm? Jealous? John’s face warms as he recalls his own, rather obvious reaction to all that. He _had_ been jealous, damn it. If Sherlock had ever been inclined to get romantic with someone, why hadn’t he ever instigated anything, back in all that time they’d lived together? John isn’t positive, but ever since Irene Adler, he has more or less believed that Sherlock is gay, or at least tending that way. If he hadn’t slept with Irene, when he had every opportunity in the world to do so, thanks to John having tactfully absented himself from the premises for precisely that reason, despite his jealousy – and if he hadn’t then, then John failed to see how he could really claim heterosexuality. He never liked Irene but she’s attractive in her way, and a woman who had captured Sherlock’s intellectual interest and still hadn’t managed to score with him strains the credulity of Sherlock being straight in any way. And he knows that Sherlock didn’t sleep with her because he asked point blank and Sherlock had looked at him as though John had asked if he was dating the Queen of England. As though it was a stupid question, and his “No!” of utter disbelief suggested that John was twelve times the imbecile Sherlock had previously imagined. Still, though; he’d taken some sort of perverse comfort in that. So Janine’s appearance had been more than a small surprise. That lift ride up to Magnussen’s office, he’d been both relieved about the lack of a real relationship and simultaneously appalled by Sherlock’s evident heartlessness. Human error, indeed. But now, reading the headlines, it seems clear that Janine wasted no time whatsoever in effecting her revenge – though, John notes, is still calling herself Sherlock’s fiancée. 

She comes by that afternoon, brandishing several copies of the papers, a spark in her eye. John meets her at the door, eyes the papers and wordlessly cedes the room to her. Clearly that’s a break-up about to happen and far be it for him to get in the way of it. He goes to buy a sandwich and when he returns twenty minutes later, Sherlock is alone and awake. 

John picks up one of the papers and sits back down in his chair, eyes flicking to the morphine dial. It’s low, almost all the way down, he’s pleased to note. “So,” he says. Conversation between them has been a bit stilted, mostly because other people have been around a lot of the time, or Sherlock has been asleep. The Holmes parents had been by, Mycroft had come (for which John had made another escape in the direction of the cafeteria), and Mrs Hudson had come, chattering away and tactfully not asking the _who_ and _why_ questions. She’d brought Sherlock some clean clothes for when he’d be allowed to wear them, kept up a cheerful stream of smalltalk and then took herself off again. Now that they’re on their own again, John isn’t sure what to say. He turns the paper toward Sherlock. “Seven times a night, was it?”

Sherlock makes a sound rather like a snort. “Hardly,” he says mildly. “But sensationalism sells. You needn’t worry that she was taken advantage of.”

In any sense, it seems. John feels privately satisfied by this. He clears his throat. “Are we ever going to talk about who shot you, what happened? You said earlier you didn’t feel up to it…”

Sherlock avoids his eyes and grimaces slightly. “Not yet. Please, John.”

He so rarely says please to anything that John backs down immediately. Still, though. “It’s just… unusual,” he says, which is a massive understatement. “I mean, I just thought you must know, since you were shot in the front. You don’t have to talk about it, of course. I can understand if it’s… traumatic, or something.”

Sherlock is quiet for a long time, thoughts clearly working quickly. Finally, after an awkwardly long pause, he says quietly, “I haven’t yet decided what I think about it. I’ll tell you more when I can.”

“All right.” John drops it for the time being. “How are you feeling?”

“About as well as can be expected,” Sherlock says. His eyes flick to the morphine drip but he doesn’t adjust it. 

In what is as close as he’ll ever be able to come to an apology for his reaction over Sherlock’s feigned relapse, John says, “You know, you can turn that up. If you’re keeping it down just to… I don’t know. Keep me from worrying or something. Don’t. If you’re in pain, use it. That’s what it’s there for.”

Sherlock smiles a bit but doesn’t look at him. “That’s not why I’m keeping it down. I need to think. I need my mind clear.”

“Ah.” John nods. “Okay.” Another silence falls in which John wonders if Sherlock can remember that John kissed him the night before last. It’s not likely to come up in casual conversation, is it? But what if Sherlock brings it up? He searches for a safer topic. “So, erm, Janine. Is that, uh, is that – ?”

“Oh yes, that’s finished,” Sherlock says, not sounding as though he minds at all. “It’s fine, John. I got what I needed out of it and she got what she wanted from it. Well, mostly.” He falls silent, thinking. “More or less. It’s fine.”

He puts his hands on the bed to shift his position, wincing a little and John is on his feet, helping him make the adjustment. “Take it easy,” he says, lifting Sherlock’s shoulders by the blades and settling him. “You’ve just been shot, remember.” It’s a bit dry. 

Sherlock has closed his eyes, breathing through the pain, the fingers of his left hand clamped around the bed rails for a moment. “So tell me,” he says, eyes still shut. “How did the shot work? Someone told me that the bullet hit the inferior vena cava. Explain.”

John sits down again. “Well,” he says, settling into doctor-mode, “the inferior vena cava is one of the largest veins in the heart.”

“Then why ‘inferior’?” Sherlock wants to know, eyes not opening. 

“It’s lower than the superior vena cava.”

“Oh.” Sherlock thinks for a moment. “Vena cava: hollow vein?”

“Yes,” John says. “It runs behind the liver and into the lower right ventricle.” He reaches over and picks up Sherlock’s chart from the end of the bed. “In your case, as would be almost inevitable, the bullet nicked one of your ribs, passed through your liver, and punctured the IVC. The internal bleeding was mostly caused by bone fragments puncturing other organs. Luckily, the bullet only hit the interior side of your liver, which meant they didn’t have to remove any of it. The blood loss from the IVC puncture is what nearly killed you, though.” John stops and clears his throat again, willing himself to keep this clinical. “That’s where the real danger came in, and why you’re still being pumped full of new blood.”

“I see.” Sherlock opens his eyes, gazing at the ceiling. His fingers twitch as though he’s longing to steeple them under his chin, but his chest couldn’t possibly take the weight of his own arms just yet. He pauses as though choosing his wording carefully, which makes John want to shake him and demand why he’s being so recalcitrant about talking about the shooting. “If my shooter had complete control over the shot and was someone who had extensive medical or anatomical knowledge, would you say it was intended to kill? Hypothetically speaking?”

John frowns, looking at the chart. “Well, if he absolutely meant to kill you, I suppose he could have gone for a head shot, couldn’t he? But I mean, apart from that, yes. More or less. You don’t expect someone to live from a shot in the chest. Not when the bullet hits the liver and the IVC. If he was just trying to slow you down and get away and didn’t want to kill you, he could have gone for a shot to the knee, the shoulder, the hip. Abdominal region would be a pretty quick bleed-out. Chest region is almost always fatal. And if we’re considering your case in particular, it damned near was fatal. In some countries you’d have been considered legally dead. Your heart had stopped beating on its own for hours. It’s called asystole, when that happens. They’d been doing CPR on you for nearly four hours when they gave up. I have no idea how you pulled that off, pulled yourself back. That’s the only explanation, though – that, or a miracle. That you somehow willed yourself back to life. I mean, sometimes releasing the pressure on the heart allows it to actually start beating on its own again, but it’s never safe to take that chance. Most people don’t come back from asystole, Sherlock. And when they do, everyone debates the how and the why and usually no one ever knows. I don’t know how you did it.” John stops abruptly, realising that he’s got louder and louder, and also that his voice is trembling. He swallows hard and doesn’t look at Sherlock. 

“John.” Sherlock’s voice is uncharacteristically gentle, magnetic, forcing John to look up at him. Their eyes meet, which feels like a punch to John’s chest. There’s something of that undisguised look that was on Sherlock’s face the other night, though only partially. Sherlock turns his right hand palm up in silent request and John silently puts both hands around it. Sherlock is looking at him with something unmistakeably like compassion, almost as though he feels sorry for John. “It’s all right,” he tells John. He’s the one who’s been shot, yet he’s comforting John. It’s completely backwards. “I didn’t die. Not this time.”

John hates the tears prickling the backs of his eyes. “You’ve got to stop doing this, damn it,” he says gruffly, and tries manfully not to cry. 

Sherlock smiles, but looks troubled. His gaze drifts back toward the ceiling, but his hand stays where it is. “Stay with me,” he requests. 

“Of course, you idiot,” John says, trying to lighten things up again, mostly for his own sake. “I’m not going anywhere.”

***

Two more days slip by. John doesn’t leave the hospital. Mary comes by to bring him some clean clothes, accompanied by a couple of short comments about how he could have come home to get them himself, that Sherlock doesn’t need babysitting round the clock, that there are plenty of medical staff there whose job it is to provide Sherlock with the medical attention he needs, and so forth. John is just as short, explaining that perhaps Mary hadn’t realised, but that Sherlock is, in fact, his best friend and that nothing can be more important than being there with him after he’s nearly died. She _knows_ what it did to him, losing Sherlock before. Why can’t she understand? Why isn’t _she_ more upset? All right, fine, so the prognosis is very good; Sherlock is on-schedule in terms of his recovery, so perhaps she’s just being positive. The clinic is short-staffed at the moment, but he’s given Lucy, the receptionist, the names of a couple of other doctors they could get in as locums for the time being. He doesn’t tell Mary that Sherlock has specifically requested that he stay. It’s not something she needs to know. She’ll just say something about Sherlock manipulating him or acting like a child, like she has on occasion in the past. She’s generally very, very good about Sherlock, but the time they were about to go to bed together, and not just to sleep in it and Sherlock had texted and he’d not only answered, but gone – Mary had been a little put out. He’d made it up to her the next day with flowers and an uninterrupted dinner that he’d cooked himself, plus he’d been particularly attentive in bed that night, and she’d let it go. Neither of them have made him choose, but the conflict still comes up sometimes, externally. Not even counting what goes on in his own head when he’s let his guard down and let his thoughts run unsupervised for too long. 

Regardless, what Sherlock has asked of him this time is between the two of them. He hasn’t said, but given how reluctant he is to speak about his attacker, John thinks that perhaps he’s got spooked. Is scared for his own safety while he’s there in the hospital, too weak to defend himself. In fact, John is fairly sure of this. And he is growing more and more impatient to know who shot Sherlock and why, _why_ Sherlock won’t talk about it. He’s been shot at plenty of times before. Surely it isn’t some sort of late-blooming trauma. But the looks on Sherlock’s face sometimes, when he thinks John isn’t watching him… John is worried. How is he supposed to protect Sherlock if he won’t tell John who shot him in the first place? Is it one of the doctors or something? (Why would a doctor have been at Magnussen’s office?) If it’s Magnussen, surely he would have said. Surely _Magnussen_ would have said, if it comes to that. In fact, why didn’t Magnussen just say who it was who had shot Sherlock? The questions buzz around his head like flies trapped between the window panes, bothering him. 

The fifth day, Lestrade texts and says he finally has some time to come visit. It’s late afternoon and John goes down to meet him by the doors, since he doesn’t know the layout of the place. As John has been practically living there, he knows every inch of it by now. He’d bought a novel and started reading it to Sherlock, just to entertain him, pass the time. He’d chosen _The Silmarillion_ , a book he’d tried and failed to get through back in uni days himself, but thought it might be sufficiently dense to hold Sherlock’s attention. He was reading selected parts of it, the longer, more detailed stories. Sherlock had dozed off now and John left him a note saying that he was going to get a bite to eat, then meet Lestrade and bring him up to visit. 

John stops in the doorway of Sherlock’s room. He’s gone. His clothes and the book are still there but his coat and shoes are gone. John sees the open window, the curtains moving gently in the breeze. He thinks of how much difficulty Sherlock has been having just shifting himself in bed and says, “Oh, Jesus.”

They start a manhunt. Everyone has different opinions on where Sherlock’s preferred boltholes are. Some of them are particularly wild (Mrs Hudson) or unlikely (Molly). Eventually John gives up, wishing something brilliant would come to him to explain Sherlock’s precipitous flight. Lestrade is of the opinion that Sherlock is hunting down his killer himself, which is not farfetched at all, but why would he have left without John, without explaining? It’s as though John is connected to his shooting somehow. Sherlock has always been one to play his cards close to the chest – as it were – but John is completely baffled and unhappy about this. He crosses the fireplace. “Or protecting them,” John says in response to Greg’s theory that Sherlock is tracking the shooter down himself. 

“Protecting the shooter? Why?” Greg asks, as though this doesn’t make sense. 

It doesn’t, and John knows it. He turns from the window. “Protecting someone, then. But why would he care? He’s Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?” He goes without thinking to his chair and sits down. And then he notices what’s odd here: the chair. Sherlock had moved it, possibly in a fit of pique over John having been away for his honeymoon for so long. Why, then, has he put it back now? Greg is still talking but John has tuned him out a bit. Who would Sherlock protect? Who has Sherlock ever protected? He knows the answer to this, but it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. _Sherlock_ was the one shot, so why would _John_ need protecting? Is he connected to the shooter, after all? 

“Mrs Hudson,” he says over his shoulder, clearing his throat, “Why does Sherlock think that I’ll be moving back in here?”

Mrs Hudson looks his way. “Oh yes, he’s put your chair back again, hasn’t he?”

John makes a thoughtful noise to himself. 

“That’s nice,” Mrs Hudson adds. “Looks much better.”

John catches a trace of scent in the air then, something very familiar. He looks around, then sees it. A bottle of Claire de la Lune. Mary’s scent. It’s not Mary’s bottle, though; it’s full. Brand new. All of his thoughts turn cold, slither into his gut and congeal there in dread. ( _No_.) Mary can’t possibly be a part of this. There’s no way. Not _Mary_. But why is the bottle there? Who else would have put it there but Sherlock? Buying a brand new bottle instead of just taking Mary’s from their flat, to which he has a spare set of keys, and pointedly leaving it by John’s chair. Is this the answer to John’s questions, then? This extremely direct clue? What is he supposed to make of this? 

He’s dimly aware that his phone is ringing and that Mrs Hudson is nattering at him to answer it. It’s Sherlock. Somehow he already knew that from its first ring. 

His hand feels like lead as he finally picks it up, forces his fingers to press down on the correct keys. 

***

“Where are you?” he asks, still having difficulty speaking around the heaviness. 

“John…” Sherlock’s voice is strained. “Do you still want to know who shot me?”

“What do you think?” John asks, his voice almost a rasp. “Of course I want to know.” His eyes fall on the bottle of scent again. He can’t ask that question. He _can’t_. ( _Is Mary somehow involved. What the bloody hell is going on. Why won’t you tell me anything._ ) 

“I’m… sorry,” Sherlock says, a burst of static coming over the phone. There’s a sound like a train in the background. (Is he in the tube, then?) “This is going to be… difficult. You were going to find out sooner or later, though. It’s safest this way. Can you come and meet me somewhere? You’ll need to do exactly as I say.”

John closes his eyes. He feels like he’s going to be ill. (He will not ask. Cannot ask.) He swallows thickly. “Give me the address,” he says. 

***

He waits in the dark of the room, the vest hidden under the material of his jacket. Sherlock has arranged the lighting exactly, pushed the ear buds of the headset into John’s ears, moving with difficulty and obvious pain, hampered by the morphine drip. He flips the collar of John’s jacket up and carefully arranges his hair to be larger than usual. Finally he unplugs the drip, slipping the needle out of his vein with practised ease and sets it up by John in the dark. He has been avoiding John’s eyes throughout this, which adds to the heavy cold thing sitting in the pit of his stomach, but now, finally, Sherlock says, “I think you’re set.”

“What’s the headset for?” He barely recognises his own voice. 

Sherlock gives him a quick look, sharp and concerned, then says, “I’m going to lead the shooter here over the phone. This is so that you can listen in.” He steadies himself on John’s shoulder, straightening, glances behind him, then says quickly, looking away from John. “John, I just want you to know…”

“What?” John asks. 

Sherlock reconsiders, obviously debating internally. Finally he says, “Whatever happens here tonight, we’ll be okay. Somehow. We’ll make it through this.” He looks at John then, with that same look he had in the hospital of a terrible amount of compassion, mixed with that momentarily unshielded vulnerability, almost pain. He looks as though he wants to say much more but isn’t allowing himself to do so. He swallows, his throat bobbing in that long, too-pale neck. “I’ll be close by,” he promises, and then he’s gone. 

John wants to go after him and ask what in hell’s name is going on, but somehow he can’t move. Sherlock has promised him answers, and he’s going to do it in his own way. Like always. John closes his eyes to wait for the phone call, and all he can see is the bottle of Claire de la Lune. 

A few minutes later, the phone rings. There’s a click on the second ring and then, “Where are you?” (Oh, God. It’s Mary.) John’s eyes are still closed and something in his heart dies forever. 

“Can’t you see me?” Sherlock’s voice now. 

“Well, what am I looking for?” (It can’t be. She can’t have been the one to have shot Sherlock. Yet even as he thinks it, John knows it has to be true. Why else would Sherlock have been so reluctant to tell him? There are a thousand things he doesn’t know, but John is horribly, completely sure of this now. Mary shot Sherlock. He can’t speak. He can’t move. Everything he has ever believed in is wrong. All he can do is listen as his world dissolves around him.) 

“The lie,” Sherlock is saying. “The lie of Leinster Gardens, hidden in plain sight. Hardly anyone notices. People live here for years and never see it, but if you are what I think you are, it’ll take you less than a minute.” There’s a pause as Mary doesn’t answer, then Sherlock prompts her. “The houses, Mary. Look at the houses.”

“How did you know I’d come here?” she asks. 

“I knew you’d talk to the people no one else would bother with.”

She gives a short laugh. “I thought I was being clever.”

“You’re always clever, Mary. I was relying on that,” Sherlock says. “I planted the information for you to find.”

There’s another brief pause, then Mary says, “Ohhh.” She sounds amused. 

“Thirty seconds,” Sherlock says. (He’s right, as always. Now he knows. Now he sees it. Why couldn’t he have seen it before?)

“What am I looking at?” Mary asks. 

“No door knobs, no letter box…” He’s prompting her. “Painted windows. Twenty-three and twenty-four Leinster Gardens. The empty houses.” John can hear the strain in his voice, slight though it is. The morphine is wearing off already; the dose was too low because clearly Sherlock wants his thoughts unmuddied. “They were demolished years ago to make way for the London Underground, a vent for the old steam trains. Only the very front section of the house remains. It’s just a façade.” He breathes deeply and John can hear the traces of pain. “Remind you of anyone, Mary? A façade?” There’s a pause during which John hears Mary inhale sharply, though he can’t tell why. “Sorry,” Sherlock’s voice continues. “I never could resist a touch of drama. Do come in. It’s a little cramped.”

“Do you own this place?” Mary asks. 

Sherlock makes an affirmative sound. “Won it in a card game with the Clarence House Cannibal. Nearly cost me my kidneys, but fortunately I had a…” He stops to breathe again, and it’s a bit ragged. “Straight flush,” he finishes. 

The door opens and Mary walks inside. It really is her. It’s not a hallucination or a bad dream. This is happening. She’s right there. He knows every inch of her silhouette, of her face, of her body. He’d thought he knew her heart and mind, too. But he’s wrong, wrong, wrong. He doesn’t know anything. Not one bloody thing. 

“Quite a gambler, that woman,” Sherlock remarks, and now it isn’t clear if he’s still talking about the Clarence House Cannibal or Mary. His wife, his Mary. John is numb. 

She stares down the narrow space in his direction. “What do you want, Sherlock?” She sounds suspicious, unwarm, uncertain: all things that she normally isn’t. 

“Mary Morstan was stillborn in October 1972,” Sherlock continues over the phone, and Mary looks confused about why she can’t hear the voice live as well as over the headset and turns to face John’s end of the hallway. “Her gravestone is in Chiswick Cemetery where, five years ago, you acquired her name and date of birth and thereafter her identity,” Sherlock goes on. Mary begins to walk slowly toward John. “That’s why you don’t have friends from before that date. It’s an old enough technique, known to the kinds of people who can recognise a skip-code on sight, have extraordinarily retentive memories.”

Mary’s eyes are still attempting to penetrate the shadows around John. “You were very slow,” she says contemptuously, sounding nothing like herself. Nothing like the person John thought he knew. (He’s been wrong all this time.) 

“How good a shot are you?” Sherlock asks over the phone, the question almost conversational except for the strain in his voice. 

She pulls a pistol out of her coat and pulls back the safety, holding it by her leg. “How badly do you want to find out?” She’s cold, completely emotionless, and absolutely willing to shoot again. John feels nauseous, half-afraid he’ll give himself away by being spectacularly ill all over his shoes. 

“If I die here,” Sherlock says, still on the phone, “my body will be found in a building with your face projected on the front of it.” (So that’s what her gasp had been about.) “Even Scotland Yard could get somewhere with that.” Mary concedes agreement, nodding. “I want to know how good you are,” Sherlock says. “Go on. Show me. The doctor’s wife must be a little bit bored by now.”

He’s goading her, and it’s absolutely working. Mary reaches into her purse and takes out a coin of some sort. She looks up, gauging the ceiling, then flicks the coin high into the air and shoots it. She lowers her head to watch the coin fall, then turns a pointed face toward John. Not smug enough to be considered triumphant, just cool, arrogant, slightly defiant. As if to say, _Impressed yet?_ A swell of something like hatred rises in John’s throat, just seeing that unfamiliar expression on her dearly familiar face. (He has no idea who this person is. It’s not his wife.) 

Sherlock walks slowly in then, approaching Mary from behind. “May I see?” His voice is grave. 

Mary squints at John, then laughs grimly and turns to face Sherlock. “It’s a dummy,” she says, and somehow this is the very last straw for John. She doesn’t know it’s him, but she might as well have called him a dummy to his face: a brainless, inanimate _thing_ without the wit of an animal, completely blind, hopelessly stupid, and utterly, utterly gullible. Part of him wants to strangle her. Mary pulls the headset from her ear. “I suppose it was a fairly obvious trick.” (Is that how she sees this? All of this? Just a trick?) She takes a few steps, casual and unconcerned, then sets her shoe on the coin and kicks it to Sherlock. 

Sherlock puts out his own foot to stop it, watching Mary warily as he stoops with obvious difficulty and picks it up. “And yet,” he says, voice clouded with pain, “over a distance over six feet, you failed to make a kill shot.” He holds the coin up to the light, examining the hole. In the light, John can see the sweat that has broken out over his face. “Enough to hospitalise me, not enough to kill me. That wasn’t a miss.” He gives a sniff that might almost be a laugh. “That was surgery.” 

Mary looks at him for a long moment, then looks down and away. 

“I’ll take the case,” Sherlock says abruptly. 

Mary’s eyes snap back to his. “What case?” she asks, impassive. 

“Yours,” he says. His face creases with sudden anger. “Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?” 

“Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever. And Sherlock, I will _never_ let that happen.” Mary’s voice is steady but she finally sounds almost sincere. (As though it even matters now, John thinks bitterly.)

Sherlock gives her a brief look, almost as though to reproach her. As though there is nothing that he would withhold from John, John thinks, and that she should know that by now. (At least that’s how he sees it, but he does not trust his own judgement in the slightest any more.) Sherlock turns away from Mary. 

“Please,” Mary says, some urgency coming into her voice. “Understand: there is nothing in this world that I would not do to stop that happening.”

Sherlock does turn and walk away now, toward the opposite end of the corridor. “Sorry,” he says coolly. “Not _that_ obvious a trick.” He straightens with difficulty, flips a switch on the breaker box, and gazes over her head to John, now revealed in the light. 

It takes Mary a moment to realise, to turn, and when she does, her face is full of horror and grief. She looks as though she’s about to cry, yet John can’t feel anything for her, not with his gut full of broken glass and that cold heaviness still coiled within him. Somehow he gets to his feet and combs his hair back down with his shaking fingers and straightens his collar, unable to think of anything but betrayal. 

“Now talk,” Sherlock says from behind her. “And sort it out. Do it quickly. Baker Street. Now.” He turns and leaves. All John knows is that he cannot be here, alone with Mary, even for a single second. He straightens his coat and follows Sherlock, brushing past Mary, unable to even look at her. 

***

Nothing Sherlock says at Baker Street makes any bloody sense and he is completely unable to understand why anyone would think that he could possibly accept this absolute rot about Mary’s shot being somehow an act of mercy rather than of murder, that he should just accept that she is apparently an assassin – a bloody _assassin_ , for fuck’s sake!! – with a past all neatly recorded on a memory stick and meanwhile Sherlock is collapsing due to internal bleeding and John’s left the morphine drip in Leinster Gardens and the ambulance crew is pressing oxygen to his face again and it’s all a screaming, red-tinged nightmare. He feels as though he can’t breathe, can’t do anything, can’t get any bloody thing right. He feels as though everyone who matters to him has betrayed him enormously – somehow the salt in the wound is that Sherlock, _Sherlock_ , of all bloody people, who was shot and very nearly _died_ because of Mary – or whoever she is, because she sure as hell is not Mary Morstan or the woman he married – and wants John to agree with him, is the worst part of all. Whatever else Sherlock has always been, and there is a great deal one could say on that subject, Sherlock is reasonable. Logical. He makes _sense_. This doesn’t make sense, not a bit of it. He’s in a daze as he watches the paramedics carry the stretcher down the stairs and into the ambulance. 

He knows he’s got to go along – he cannot possibly be alone with Mary now. There is no way. He gives her a dark look. “You stay away from the hospital,” he says harshly. “Leave us alone.” He pockets the memory stick and follows the paramedics, stumbling on the stairs and trying not to fall. 

The nightmare quality stays with him. This time no one asks who he is; they know he’s with Sherlock. He’s allowed into the same observation room while they defibrillate Sherlock’s heart and John wants to slap him for having done this to himself, yet knows exactly why he did it. He can’t think; can’t possibly ask his brain to process this right now. So he’ll do the only thing he knows how to do: watch over Sherlock and pray to any gods who might be listening to keep his friend from dying. Again. 

***

The second hospital stay is worse than the first. Sherlock is kept asleep perforce of the high levels of morphine he’s on. His escape stunt caused his incision to reopen and his liver and punctured lungs to start bleeding again. On top of that, his blood volume was too low when he unhooked himself from the supply, which lowered his blood pressure dangerously. John is the same blood type, so he donates twice in forty-eight hours and sleeps a lot in the other bed. He’s in a state of near-shock himself and thinks it’s just as well he and Sherlock are rarely conscious at the same time. This time the hospital staff bring him food, too, and it’s terrible. Sometimes he eats it, sometimes he doesn’t. He still leaves to buy coffee, just to get out of the room sometimes. Sherlock was put in a different room from the last one, but a hunt one day proves that they’ve still got Sherlock’s clothes and the copy of _The Silmarillion_ that John had bought. 

On the fourth day, Sherlock is awake and clumsily feeding himself soup, a clear broth of some sort when John comes back from one of his wanderings around the hospital. He stops in the doorway of what has become “their” room. 

Sherlock doesn’t look up at him. “It was this or stay on the IV,” he says by way of explanation. 

John makes a sound to show he heard and goes to sit in his chair. His backside is going to end up shaped like this chair, he thinks. He reaches for the paper he left on the tray table by Sherlock’s bed and opens it, flipping to the back sections he hadn’t read earlier. 

Sherlock goes on painstakingly eating his soup. “This is rubbish,” he says after awhile, and gives up on it. “Your soup is much better.”

“It was tinned,” John says, not looking up. 

“Always?”

“Every time.”

“Oh.” A silence falls, not a particularly comfortable one. Sherlock fidgets. “Are you angry with me?” he asks after about ten minutes have gone by. 

John keeps his eyes on the paper. “I’m angry at everyone and everything,” he says shortly. “And we are not talking about this right now.”

Sherlock makes a small sound to himself. “I see,” he says. 

John closes the paper and puts it back down on the table, getting to his feet. “I’m going for a walk,” he says shortly. He doesn’t tell Sherlock that he always alerts security when he plans to be away from the room for any length of time, like when he ventures across the street to the Costa Coffee, just for a change from the cafeteria. Perhaps this is cruel. Is Sherlock still worried that Mary will come after him? John isn’t even sure whether he himself is, or not. She seems to want his forgiveness, though they haven’t spoken since the night of the dreadful revelation. 

“Where are you going?” Sherlock asks, his voice unusually quiet, when he gets to the door. 

John stops and doesn’t look back. “Just to get a coffee. Clear my head a bit.”

“I miss coffee,” Sherlock says, a touch wistfully. 

“You know you can’t have caffeine right now.” John shoves his hands into his pockets.

“Of course I know. I still miss it.” Thinking he’s finished, John starts to walk again but stops when Sherlock says his name. 

“Yeah?” He glances back over his shoulder. 

Sherlock is sitting up, one hand pressed to the bandage on his bare chest as though physically holding back the pain. Their eyes meet, Sherlock looking uneasy and strangely young. “Maybe when you come back, you could read me some of that book?” he suggests. It’s hesitant, as though he’s afraid John will take his head off for it. 

John feels his shoulders relax a little. “Yeah, I could do that,” he says. He looks away again. “Do you want anything better to eat than that soup? A scone or something?”

Sherlock actually looks tempted, which must mean he’s truly hungry. That’s a good sign, if his appetite is returning. He shrugs a bit. “I don’t mind,” he says. 

John shrugs back. “I’ll see if I see anything that looks edible, then,” he says. 

Sherlock gives him a partial smile. “You know what I like,” he says. 

John turns away. “I don’t know anything about anyone any more,” he says tersely, and leaves before Sherlock can answer. 

***

Two days later, Sherlock is allowed officially out of bed again, for short breaks. John finally goes home, having recycled all of the clothes Mary had brought to the hospital before a couple of times already. When he gets back, Sherlock isn’t in the room. He waits, and Sherlock comes back twenty minutes later. “Where were you?” John asks sharply. 

“Cafeteria,” Sherlock says vaguely. He’s wheeling the morphine drip with him, but he’s not high; his eyes are clear and he’s quite lucid. (Good.) He gets carefully back into bed with John’s help, hands lingering on John’s wrists a bit longer than necessary. When they’ve got him settled, he asks, “Are you going to read to me?”

“Can do, if you want,” John replies. The book has become their neutral territory. They don’t talk about anything else, just smalltalk and Sherlock’s condition. Sherlock watches him from behind his lashes and cups of water and the newspaper, but doesn’t ask his silent questions. John can feel his concern but can’t deal with it, doesn’t want to think about himself at all. The book gives them a topic. He picks it up, crosses his legs at the knee and finds the page they were on. He begins to read, and the old-fashioned words and the mythology of Tolkien’s world are soothing to slip into, away from his painful reality. He reads for an hour, until his voice starts to tire. Sherlock looks interested but drowsy and eventually admits when John asks that he thinks he might sleep a bit. John marks the page and sets the book on the table. “Sleep, then,” John tells him. He looks toward the other bed and decides he might as well take a nap, too. There’s nothing else he feels like doing; he’s avoided his phone and email both since all this happened. He doesn’t know if people know anything but he doesn’t want to be bothered with idiot questions for which he doesn’t have any answers himself. 

***

The next day, Sherlock asks again if he can’t go home yet. The supervising physician tells him again how far Sherlock’s escape set back his recovery and Sherlock endures the lecture while staring at a spot on the floor. Eventually John decides to intercede. “He won’t be on his own,” he says. “I’ll be there to look after him.”

Sherlock shoots a keenly blue look at him, possibly a bit startled. “Will you?” he asks. 

John feels his mouth and brow both crunch into a frown. “What do you think?” he says crossly. “That I’d stay with you here all this time and then desert you once you go home?”

Sherlock stares back at him for a long moment, then seems to give in, his shoulders sagging as though some tension has gone out of them. He transfers his gaze back to the doctor, waiting expectantly. 

The doctor hesitates, then looks at John. “Can you really be there to supervise full-time?” he asks, his doubts plain. “I mean, surely you’ve got a job to get back to…”

“It doesn’t matter.” John is short. “I’m available.”

“There are still difficult times ahead,” the other doctor reminds John. “I’m aware of your expertise, Dr Watson, but I’d really advise against this. The patient is still heavily dependent on morphine and hasn’t even had his stitches removed yet. Too much movement of the wrong sort could result in the internal wounds reopening, and then you’d just have to come back here anyway, Mr Holmes.”

“I won’t move too much,” Sherlock says, intense. “I thought that stitches dissolved on their own these days.”

The other doctor glances at John again. “Not these ones,” he says. “We had to use the old sort of thread the second time, nylon thread, because the healing process was badly interrupted when you ripped the first set of polydioxanone stitches. Though as a matter of fact, these are scheduled to come out in a couple of days.”

“I can do that,” John says firmly. “Really. He gets into trouble somewhat regularly. I’m used to patching him up and I can certainly take care of him with all this. We’ll get some morphine. And I’ll monitor the intake.”

The doctor consults Sherlock’s chart with an air of defeat. “It’s against my better judgement, but as you both seem so set on it – ”

“Thank you,” Sherlock cuts him off, just this side of rudeness. He gets carefully to his feet. “John. Would you mind bringing me my clothes?”

“Not at all.” Frankly, John can’t wait to get out of here and back to Baker Street himself, even if he has to admit that it really is too soon for Sherlock to be essentially checking himself out. But he _will_ be there. 

Sherlock seems reluctant to dress while the doctor is still there. The beleaguered man takes the hint and goes as John sets a bundle of clothing down on the bed. Sherlock looks at him, opens his mouth, then hesitates. 

John gets it. “Need help?” he asks bluntly. 

Sherlock closes his mouth and glances away. “If it’s convenient,” he says stiffly. 

John sighs. “You really _aren’t_ well enough to be discharged yet, you know.” He finds a pair of pants and crouches down. “Come on. One foot at a time, then.”

Sherlock steadies himself with a hand on John’s head, naturally. “Then why did you agree to come home with me?” he asks, still terse. 

“Because I’m dying to get out of here as much as you are, or close to,” John says. “And you’ll be more comfortable at home.” He gets Sherlock’s second foot into the proper leg hole, pointedly keeping his eyes away from any problematic zones, even Sherlock’s underclothes themselves. They’re black and feel silky to the touch and that is already more than enough information, thank you. He pulls them up to just above Sherlock’s knees, standing as he goes, then steps away. “Got it from there?” (God, he sounds awkward. He was aiming for clinical detachment.)

“Yes, thank you,” Sherlock says, sounding no less stiff than he had.

John looks away as Sherlock works his pants up under the gown and wonders again how on earth he managed to dress himself the afternoon he escaped, and why no one thought anything odd in seeing an exquisitely turned out man in a Spencer Hart suit and the billowing Belstaff coat wheeling a morphine drip down the pavement was in any way out of place. Had he taken a _cab_ with that thing? Honestly. He busies himself unfolding Sherlock’s trousers meanwhile, then helps Sherlock into those, too. The shirt is easy; Sherlock only requires help with the second arm. 

“Are the stitches really coming out in a day or two?” Sherlock asks, wincing a little as he slides carefully into the suit jacket.

"We'll see how it goes." John would have told Sherlock to forget the jacket but Sherlock hasn’t been outside in days, not to his knowledge, at least, and he doesn’t want him getting cold. Autumn has begun and it was chilly when John went to the flat yesterday. The Belstaff goes on next, then he tells Sherlock to sit down in the visitors’ chair (John’s chair) and puts on his socks and shoes for him. It feels odd to do this with a grown man, dressing him as though he’s a child. He’s decidedly not a child, and it shouldn’t in any way be at all arousing to be putting clothes _on_ another person. He’ll ignore that thought, thank you very much. That’s the last thing he needs to be thinking of just now, whatever his perpetual state of confusion regarding all of… that is, when he already has a heart full of poison and a head full of rage and betrayal. He gets to his feet and helps Sherlock to his. “Come on,” he says, gruffly. “Let’s go find a taxi.”

***

At Baker Street, John feels a fresh wave of unease about this decision on the stairs. He’d put Sherlock’s arm over his shoulders and has been bearing most of his weight as it is. When they reach the landing, John looks and sees that Sherlock is grey-faced and sweating, lips compressed in obvious pain. There’s nothing John can say; he helped Sherlock convince the doctor to let him go, after all. He stops. “Need a break?”

“I’m fine,” Sherlock says with obvious effort. 

“Bullshit.” John gives him an annoyed look. “You’re nowhere near fine. Lie to anyone else if you want, but I’m the one helping you put your pants on, remember?”

Sherlock’s lips tighten even further. “Please tell me that was the last time you’re going to cast that in my face, particularly as I imagine it will happen several more times.”

John feels a twinge of remorse but doesn’t say so. “Look,” he says, voice a little gentler, “what if I just carry you up the rest of the way?” Sherlock hesitates. “I won’t remind you about it later or be a dick about it,” John adds. “Come on. You look half-wrecked already.”

Sherlock looks frustrated but nods and looks away, the arm that’s about John’s shoulders tightening. He keeps his face turned away as John lifts him, possibly embarrassed. John trudges up the remaining eight stairs up to the flat and thinks of his first walk up these stairs, following Sherlock’s energetic leaps while he struggled gamely behind him with his cane. Everything has changed since then, he thinks, in good ways and bad. Lately, all bad. Except for this, possibly. Despite Sherlock’s pained humiliation at having to be carried, John is actually surprised to find that he can carry him without difficulty. He’s heavy, but it’s manageable. The door to the flat is unlocked as usual, and John shoulders his way inside. 

“Where to?” he asks. “Sofa? Bedroom? Chair?”

“Chair,” Sherlock says, and John deposits him there as gently as he can, then backs up to have a look at him. 

“Christ,” he says grimly. “You look done in. I’m getting some morphine.”

Sherlock doesn’t argue, closing his eyes. When John returns with the morphine he bought at the pharmacy in the hospital foyer on their way out, he opens his mouth when instructed and obediently swallows the pills John gives him. He shakes his head at the glass of water John offers, so John drinks it himself and sits down across from Sherlock. “You okay?” he asks. 

“Fine,” Sherlock answers, eyes still closed. 

“You look awful,” John says flatly. Sherlock doesn’t acknowledge this. “You’re going to fall asleep there, you know.”

“Maybe.”

“I should have put you on the sofa. That’s no place to sleep.”

“Just… let me sit here for a few minutes,” Sherlock requests, probably in no hurry to be moved again after the ordeal of coming home. 

John relents. “Okay.” Then, “You want some tea? I think there’s still some of that decaf mixed box that someone gave us once.”

Sherlock’s right shoulder moves in what might be a shrug. “Sure,” he says, slurring in fatigue (too soon for it to be morphine). He’ll probably be asleep by the time John’s made the tea. 

It gives him something to do, though. He makes Sherlock a cup of chamomile and himself a cup of English breakfast and takes both cups back to the sitting room. Sherlock is awake enough to accept his tea. John sits down again, and remembers a question that occurred to him several days ago. “Sherlock?” He gets an _Hmm?_ in response. “How did you move my chair back?”

Sherlock actually smiles at this. “Bill Wiggins,” he says. 

That explains that, then. “Where was it?”

“In your room.”

“Why?”

“Seemed symbolically appropriate at the time.”

Interesting. John subsides into silence. After awhile, Sherlock falls asleep, the cup of tea almost untouched on the table beside him. He wakes slightly as John hauls him up as gently as he can and half-drags him to his bed. “I’ll be here if you need me,” he tells Sherlock, meaning the sitting room. 

He’s at the door before he hears Sherlock’s drowsy/stoned response. “I always need you, John.”

It lightens the weight that’s been crushing his chest for days, but after he’s gone back to the sitting room, he opens Sherlock’s main laptop and pulls up his blog. The sight of Mary’s face next to his in the wedding photos is like a punch in the gut, and all of the heaviness comes rushing right back, like a black cloud that he can’t breathe through. 

***

“Just hold still,” John says. 

Sherlock is sitting on the lid of the loo, bare to the waist, his jaw tense from when John removed the bandaging just now. “You’re sure it’s not too soon to be taking them out?”

“Yes,” John says. “The skin is nearly healed. It’s what’s behind the skin you should be worrying about. That’s what hurts, and the local anaesthetic isn’t going to do anything about that.”

“I know,” Sherlock grits out. “It’s the pressure when you push on my chest.”

John is sitting on one of the kitchen chairs he’s pulled into the bathroom; it’s the only room with bright and direct enough light for this. “I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. “I can either be as gentle as possible or as quick as possible. What would you prefer?”

Sherlock swallows audibly. “Gentle,” he requests. 

It must really hurt, then. John gave him a double dose of morphine half an hour ago in preparation for this, but he supposes that in pill form it does take longer to metabolise. “Okay,” he says. “Here we go.” He slips the end of the stitch cutters under the loop of the first stitch and cuts, careful to avoid where the newly-healed skin is trying to grow over it already. His hands are very steady, but he has to brace himself somewhere, so he puts his left hand on Sherlock’s bare shoulder. Another stitch. Sherlock catches his breath on the third one. “Did that hurt?” John asks, checking. 

“Everything hurts,” Sherlock says through clenched teeth. 

“Yeah,” John says quietly, cutting through two more stitches. “I know the feeling.”

Sherlock is silent through the next few, but it seems that he’s stiller, a new sort of attentiveness hanging about him. He winces a little as a stubborn thread clings to his skin but doesn’t complain. John snips and cuts, apologising once as he snags a couple of new skin cells. Sherlock sits perfectly still, his face three inches from John’s as John bends forward in concentration on his chest.

The silence hangs over them in the yellow light of the bathroom. John cuts through the last stitch. “There,” he says. “Done. Now you just have to pull the bits of thread out, but that can wait. Or if you like, I can do it now.”

“Just do it.” Sherlock is curt. 

“All right.” John thinks for a moment, then fishes out a pair of tweezers so that he won’t end up pinching Sherlock’s incision with his fingers. The incision had split open, ripping Sherlock’s first set of stitches during his ill-advised escape to Leinster Gardens the previous week and the skin is still raw and fragile. It will certainly scar. John painstakingly picks out the black nylon threads one by one until they’re gone. Sherlock will bear this scar for the rest of his days: the scar left on him by John’s wife. They’ll both carry scars, John thinks, his thoughts blackening in his mind. Only Sherlock will wear his on the exterior and John on the interior. He’s absently got out the gauze and antibacterial cream and sturdy medical tape that will stick unpleasantly to the skin and rip out Sherlock’s fine, auburn chest hair when it’s time to change it. But for a moment he’s got stuck, thinking about scars and staring at the wound, his thoughts too knotted and bitter for words. 

“John,” Sherlock says, his voice low and gravelly, and meaning far too much. He hasn’t brought this up since that first aborted try, but now there’s too much understanding there, too much compassion – real, heart-deep compassion that John almost didn’t know Sherlock was capable of (yes, he did. He knows he did.) He has no right to shut Sherlock entirely out of this; it’s _their_ problem, their shared problem. Mary shot them both, in a way. Has mortally wounded them both. 

“Don’t,” John says, his voice thick in his throat, and Sherlock desists. He cuts a square of gauze and daubs the ointment along the line of Sherlock’s incision. Sherlock inhales sharply but doesn’t move, even when John tapes the gauze into place as deftly as he can, trying not to put any weight on Sherlock’s chest. He finishes, then looks down at his work and puts his other hand on Sherlock’s shoulder too, at the curve of his neck, then leans his forehead against Sherlock’s. “You’re going to be all right,” he says, as much to convince himself as Sherlock. “The pain is going to be rough for awhile, but you’re going to be all right down the road.”

“I could say the same thing to you,” Sherlock says, and something in his voice makes John opens his eyes. Sherlock is looking right into them, into his soul it feels like, at this proximity. There’s a long moment where they just look at each other, and then Sherlock is the one to angle his face slightly to the right and put his lips on John’s. 

The strength with which he responds speaks more to a sense of desperation than one of passion but John’s not even sure he knows the difference at the moment and doesn’t care. It’s wrong, the timing is completely fucked up, but it’s like water after having been lost in a desert and for several long, intensely good minutes, he clings to Sherlock with the strength of a dying man. Sherlock’s hands are gripping his elbows, possibly uncertain of their admittance any closer, but his lips and, a few minutes later, tongue are just as committed to this as John’s are. Finally John makes himself break the kiss, aware that his response to this is appallingly quick considering the mess his life is at the moment and that this really, _really_ needs to not go any further. “I’m – sorry,” he pants, only realising then that he’s out of breath. “Sherlock – I can’t – ”

“I know,” Sherlock says, but reaches for John’s face now and draws it down, kissing his forehead instead, twice, three times, his lips slow and lingering on John’s face. 

It’s the morphine, John realises. His heart sinks a little, not that he doubts the sincerity of Sherlock’s spontaneous kiss, but his judgement is impaired right now. That he should have chosen this moment, after all their years of dancing around it, is wrong. John gently but firmly removes his face from Sherlock’s large, delicate hands and stands up. 

Before he can move away, though, Sherlock leans forward and presses his face into John’s stomach through his t-shirt, long arms wrapping themselves loosely around John’s waist and hips. “I’m sorry,” Sherlock mumbles into his belly. “So sorry. Don’t go.”

John can’t help himself responding, not now, not with Sherlock. He bends and puts his arms around Sherlock’s head, burying his face in Sherlock’s curls. “I can’t,” he says, his throat constricted with warring emotions and misery. “You’re not – it’s the morphine,” he says. “It has nothing to do with me.” He doesn’t quite believe this and anyway, he’s undermining it by letting Sherlock hug him in his state at all, never mind hugging back like he is, but he has to say it anyway. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” Sherlock says, his breath making warm condensation through the thin cotton of John’s shirt. “It has everything to do with you.”

“But we can’t,” John chokes out. “I’m – ”

“I know, John,” Sherlock murmurs. “IknowIknowIknow.” The words tumble over his lips, slurring together, his face pressed into John’s belly. 

The tears are on John’s face and wetting Sherlock’s hair. He makes himself let go of Sherlock’s hair where his fingers have clenched into fists and kisses the top of Sherlock’s head. He takes a deep breath and tries to say something normal, get hold of himself. “Let’s get you to your room,” he says. “Come on.”

He lifts Sherlock carefully by the rib cage and Sherlock promptly collapses against him, limbs limp. “Sorry,” he says into John’s neck, muffled. 

“Oh Christ, maybe I shouldn’t have given you such a large dosage,” John groans, but the slight humour of it helps clear his mind a little. He manages to get Sherlock out of the bathroom and around the corner into his bedroom, though Sherlock musters enough motor control to lean John against the inner wall for a moment, face ducking to press his mouth to John’s again, as though he can’t help it. John surrenders weakly to it for a moment, then pushes Sherlock away even as he supports his weight. “Stop it,” he orders. _God_ , Sherlock is pliant and willing and all too interested right now and part of John would like nothing more than to get him into bed and let Sherlock snog him for hours, taking comfort where he can find it, but he doesn’t want to use Sherlock that way. And it would never only be about comfort and he knows it, and that’s way too complicated right now, for both of them. He gets Sherlock manoeuvred into bed and freezes for a second, noticing that Sherlock, all but nude in his loose pyjama pants, is sporting a hard-on, at least a partial one, and the sight of it sends a pang of desire directly into John’s balls, so acute that for a couple of seconds he forgets to breathe. Leave it to Sherlock to still be able to get it up while on an opiate high. He closes his eyes briefly and reminds himself in the sternest of tones that he is a medical professional, for crying out loud, and of the existence of the notion of propriety. He pulls Sherlock’s blankets over him and goes to leave at once. 

“John.” Sherlock is plaintive and drowsy at the same time. “Don’t go.”

“I need to,” John says immediately, “and right now, you need me to, too. I’ll see you in the morning when things are – clearer.”

Sherlock looks like he’s going to argue for a moment, then shuts his mouth. “What if I need you, in the night?”

“I’ll be in the sitting room, like last night,” John says. He needs to leave the room. In his tenuous state, he can’t trust himself or his own judgement, and Sherlock is in no state to make any serious decisions of his own. 

“It’s too far,” Sherlock says, and if he sounded petulant or childish John would know that he was just trying to manipulate him, but this is soft and genuine. “I don’t think I can raise my voice loud enough yet for you to hear me from there.”

John weighs this and realises Sherlock is probably right. “Fine,” he says shortly. “I’ll sit here on the chair, then.”

Sherlock is silent for a moment. Then, “It’s a large bed. Nothing would…” he trails off, perhaps doubting the veracity of his own statement. 

“Exactly,” John says, very dryly. “Chair it is. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He doesn’t wait for Sherlock’s response, but goes into the bathroom, shuts the door and runs the taps at full blast, unzips his jeans and has the fastest, roughest wank of his life. It’s so wrong and the very last thing he needs to be doing right or even thinking of right now, but it’s certainly better than what he was on the verge of doing. It takes less than two minutes, and Christ, he must have been hard in his jeans even before Sherlock kissed him, because it’s never this fast. He comes as quietly as he can, seeing stars and making a mess all over the counter. He can’t meet his own eyes in the mirror as he cleans it up, still breathing hard. He takes a very long shower after that, trying to calm himself sufficiently to go back into Sherlock’s room. 

***

He dozes in the chair off and on, finally giving in and crawling into the far side of Sherlock’s bed toward four in the morning, staying as far from Sherlock as he can. He doesn’t need the complication right now, he tells himself. It’s just that sleeping in the chair was too uncomfortable, yet he _does_ want to be near in case Sherlock needs him. 

Which he does. Sherlock wakes around five with a groan, and not the sort John was worried about earlier. His face is pale and clammy, his hand going to his chest, his breathing laboured. John gets out of bed and retrieves the morphine tablets from Sherlock’s dresser, extracts one and then crawls over the bed to prop Sherlock’s head up so that he can swallow. Being without the regular drip is taxing, John thinks, worried. Perhaps they should have got liquid ampoules, but the last thing he wants is to leave syringes lying around the flat. Never mind his private worries about Sherlock and needles, it would never do for Mycroft or Lestrade or Mrs Hudson to stumble across _those_. Sherlock is trembling, but the morphine will ease the pain in half an hour or so. Perhaps tomorrow night he should set an alarm at four so that Sherlock doesn’t wake only after the previous dose has already worn off. He lies on his side facing Sherlock, who is on his back and trying to breathe slowly in response to John’s instruction to do so, and waits until Sherlock has finally drifted back to sleep before caving to his own exhaustion. 

In the morning, they don’t talk about either incident. Sherlock avoids direct eye contact for most of the day, yet is noticeably more physically affectionate. Not enough so that John has to say anything, but Sherlock stands a bit too near to John as John cooks that evening, closes his hands around John’s for a moment before accepting a cup of tea, sits a little too close to him on the sofa as they watch the news later. John is struggling not to think about the previous evening’s incident at all. Sherlock seems a little more reticent than usual and John can’t tell if he’s embarrassed about all the kissing or not. He’s trying his best not to even let his thoughts wander in that direction, but it’s proving somewhat impossible to ignore. How does that even work, then – that he’s breaking his heart over the enormity of Mary’s betrayal, yet still responding to whatever deeply-buried desire for Sherlock he’d always managed to keep hidden before? Only it’s not anywhere near as simple as physical attraction, of course. The option of just engaging in a bit of the rough on the side in the name of mutual comfort and satisfaction isn’t open to them here, at least not for John. He knows very well that it could never just be sex. Sherlock would possess him, heart and soul if John were to give him his body. He’s quite sure now that Sherlock loves him, in whatever odd, possibly limited way Sherlock has, but he has no idea what John would require of him in return, if they were to go there. It would have to be everything, absolutely all of him. Anything less would kill John, or he would kill Sherlock for withholding it. Yet the pull is there all the time, as John watches the news anchor mouth good night, an almost magnetic attraction to which he has been paying far more attention than the news. 

He switches off the telly. “Bed?” he asks Sherlock. 

Sherlock makes a sound of assent. He’s had a pill lately, just enough to keep the pain at bay. John stands and helps him up, trying to avoid eye contact and keep this as uncomplicated as possible. Once on his feet Sherlock is fine for getting around, but the sofa is low and difficult to get out of at the best of times. This is decidedly not the best of times. John goes into the bathroom and strips down to his pants and t-shirt, as his pyjamas are all at the flat and he doesn’t have any desire to go back there at the moment. He brushes his teeth, splashes water over his face, and vacates the room for Sherlock’s use. Sherlock has managed to change into a new pair of pyjama pants on his own. It would be easier here than at the hospital, John thinks; Sherlock’s bed is much closer to the floor and it wouldn’t be as far to bend over. After he’s gone into the bathroom, John looks at the bed and debates. He can’t take another night in the chair. He’ll just be an adult about this. It will be fine. 

Sherlock returns a few minutes later. There’s a slight hitch in his breath when he sees John in his bed, sitting up under the blankets and holding the copy of _The Silmarillion_ on his knees. He makes his way to the bed and gets in carefully. John helps him adjust until he’s comfortable, then says, “I could read to you, if you want.”

Sherlock doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, a trifle stiffly, “Are we still not talking, then?”

John opens his mouth with the ready _We are talking, what do you call this, then?_ line, but shuts it again. He knows precisely what Sherlock means. He looks down not at Sherlock but at the cover of the book in his hands. “What do you want to talk about?” he asks, his voice low. 

“Something of actual importance would be nice,” Sherlock says with a touch of exasperation. He’s lying on his back, the pillows propped under his shoulders, hands by his sides. “It’s been nothing but smalltalk or silence since… last week.”

He means the night John found out about Mary, John knows. He wrestles with various responses to that. His temptation is to say something sharp, but sharpness doesn’t fit with the way Sherlock was kissing him last night, even those innocent(ish) kisses on the forehead conveying more passion that he knew Sherlock possessed. “Maybe I just don’t know what I want to say about it all just yet,” he says slowly. “I still feel… dazed. I’m so angry.”

“With me?” Sherlock asks, his gaze fixed firmly on the far wall. 

John doesn’t know what to say to this. No, not strictly, he thinks, but – no. Suddenly that becomes clearer to him. This isn’t Sherlock’s fault in any way. “No. Not with you.”

Sherlock accepts this with a slight twitch at the corners of his mouth that might have been the ghost of a smile. “But you don’t want to talk about yesterday. Clearly.”

John feels his face heat a little. “Not really,” he says. 

“Fine,” Sherlock says, “though if we’re being fair, you started it.”

“What? No, I didn’t.” John doesn’t understand. 

“You kissed me,” Sherlock says stubbornly. “In the hospital. The night I was shot.”

The heat grows noticeably. “I didn’t think you’d remembered that,” he admits. 

Sherlock snorts. “Please, John. Of course I remembered. One doesn’t forget something like that.”

“You didn’t delete that?” John asks, unable to keep from the dig. 

Sherlock is quiet for a long time, as though choosing his response carefully. Finally, when he does speak, all he says is, “No.”

It’s a bit small and John relents. He puts the book aside and shifts down in the bed, putting his arm over Sherlock’s upper chest, just under his chin and well away from the wound, and presses a long, gentle kiss to his temple. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

Sherlock doesn’t turn his face, doesn’t push it to become something else. “I never delete anything about you, John,” he says, still to the far wall. 

This makes John laugh, to his own surprise. “Good,” he says. 

Sherlock doesn’t laugh. “John,” he says, still very serious. He pauses for a moment. “What are you going to do with the memory stick?”

John hasn’t forgotten about it, would that he could. “I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t seem to make up my mind. I assume you think I should read it.”

“I think she’s wagering on you deciding to be noble and not to read it,” Sherlock tells him. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

John believes this devoutly. He turns the notion over in his mind and it fits. “You reckon that’s why she gave it to me? Just to keep me from actually getting to her information?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “But it’s irrelevant either way: I’m ninety-nine percent sure that it’s empty, and that she’s counting on your chivalry and compassion both that you won’t read it.”

John feels his thoughts darken again. “Well, there’s an easy way to answer _that_ question,” he says shortly. 

Sherlock turns his head slightly, though John’s face is still above his. “You’ll look at it, then?”

John sighs. “I suppose I have to, don’t I?”

“It’s your decision,” Sherlock says at once, as though he hasn’t just successfully convinced John to read it. “Though I’d want to know. I _do_ want to know. But it’s your decision to make.”

“No, I suppose I’ve really got to,” John says heavily. He looks down over Sherlock’s pale chest and the large square of gauze taped down over his liver and inferior vena cava and thinks that Sherlock, who is still in pain because of Mary’s shot, probably has the right to know his would-be killer, too. “Tomorrow,” he says. “We can read it together.”

Sherlock twists his face up and back to look at him then, and the very look on his face makes John want to kiss him. He shouldn’t, but… he shifts down further so that he’s side-by-side with Sherlock now and answers the silent but very clear request on Sherlock’s face with his lips. He doesn’t let it last long, just a few seconds and then he makes himself pull away. Sherlock keeps his eyes closed a moment longer as though in denial that it has ended, then exhales and touches his tongue to his lips, as though trying to taste John there. “Are you going to go back to her?” he asks, eyes closed as though he can’t bear to see John’s face for the answer to his question. 

John makes a noise of disbelief. “ _No_ ,” he says, with force. “What do you take me for?”

Sherlock opens his eyes, the crease at the bridge of his nose appearing. “Someone who is extraordinarily compassionate and loving and forgiving,” he says. 

Something in John’s heart warms suddenly and unexpectedly at this, and before he knows it, his mouth is on Sherlock’s again, hungry, and Sherlock’s lips open under his onslaught, tongues touching, pushing at each other’s. John breaks it off long enough to say, “Sherlock, we really sh – ” but cuts himself off, unable to make himself stop, never mind Sherlock. After another few long, wonderful minutes of this, he tries again to get hold of himself and succeeds this time. Sherlock’s eyes are all pupil, the irises shrunk to tiny silver rings at the edges and maybe he’s capable of more emotion than John had given him credit for, he thinks now. 

But all he says is, “Okay.” He accepts John’s dictum without question. “Then perhaps you should read to me after all,” he says, almost as an afterthought. 

John almost says something wild about how Sherlock possibly expects him to calm down sufficiently to read dense, complex Tolkien in his present state, but he also recognises that Sherlock is offering him a way out of the conversation, a way to be normal and platonic and something that John can accept at the moment. “Er – all right,” he says, and reaches to the book off to his left somewhere. He clears his throat, finds the page they were on, with Beren and Thingol’s confrontation over Luthien, and reads until Sherlock falls asleep. 

***

He wakes with a start, in the throes of a nightmare. The alarm on his phone is ringing. Disoriented, John slaps at it until the noise stops, then remembers why he had set it. He turns over. Sherlock is blinking sleepily, already awake. John has the packet of pills in his hand already. “Morphine time,” he says and Sherlock makes a noise of understanding. He opens his mouth obediently and John puts the pill on his tongue. 

Sherlock swallows. “That was a good idea,” he says, eyes closing again. 

“Told you I was the brilliant one,” John says. It’s a bad joke but his mind is full of the nightmare. He lies down on his side again, facing away from Sherlock. 

“Were you dreaming?” Sherlock asks from behind him, his voice low and sleepy 

“Yeah, I was,” John responds. He sounds unhappy even to himself. “Nightmare, really.”

“Thought so. You were making angry sounds in your sleep.” Sherlock hesitates. “Do you want to talk about it?”

John closes his eyes, his mind full of images of it. “No.” He was looking for the memory stick in the dream, only every time he spotted it, it would dissolve before his eyes. Only right at the end had he been able to close his hand around it, only to find it had turned into a gun in his hand and suddenly Mary was in front of him and she had teeth like knives, like a Doctor Who alien, and was baring them in his face. That was probably the alarm startling him, he realises now, but it doesn’t take away the frustration of the fruitless search, or the shock of Mary. Mary, who was so different from what he’d thought, what he’d wanted her to be. What he’d stupidly believed her to be. It’s humiliating on top of everything else. He lived with a bloody genius for two years, yet couldn’t see the truth of the enormous deception in his own life, in his home and heart and bed. She played him for an utter fool and he feels like a complete idiot. Her act was totally convincing, at least for him. He fully believed that she was sweet and funny and grumpy after a long day at work, that she liked cats and disliked the rain, liked baking bread, hated taking out the trash. He’d believed all her stories about uni days, all of those artfully woven stories about friends from back then who had never existed, classes she’d probably never taken. The entirety of it, the sheer expanse of the lie obliterated everything else. It didn’t matter if the woman he’d married still claimed to love him; she’s a total stranger. 

As he’s lying there, filled from head to toe with bitterness that wants to seep out every pore and stain everything around him, Sherlock turns on his side with care, moves closer and settles himself behind John. His upper chest is against John’s back, his thighs coming to rest against John’s, one long foot pushed between John’s ankles, an arm coming around John’s chest, pulling him back against himself. It’s as tangible as comfort could possibly feel, John thinks, having Sherlock effectively draped all around him like a blanket. It eases the tangle of his pent-up frustration and humiliation and rage and pain ever so slightly and after a longish while, he feels his shoulders relax a little bit. 

“That’s it,” Sherlock says in his ear, his voice low and weary and gentle all at once. “Let it go for now. Just sleep, John. I’ll be here.”

“Okay,” John says, his voice so tight it barely comes out at all. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep again, but some inner instinct still obeys Sherlock more or less unquestioned, and he feels himself beginning to slip away again. 

***

When he next wakes, it’s with a gasp of pleasure and his entire mind comes rushing online in a heartbeat – his body having already got there some time ago, it would seem. Sherlock is still curled behind him and his large hand is inside John’s pants and slowly, firmly stroking his cock. And what’s more, John’s hand is on top of his, squeezing and encouraging it. How the hell had he missed the start of _that?_ He’s hard as a rock and his hips are, completely autonomously, rocking forward, pushing himself into Sherlock’s fist. Sherlock is every bit as hard, rubbing himself against John’s arse through his pants, his chin hooked on John’s shoulder, surrounding John almost entirely. “Sherlock!” John gasps out, his mind catching up with his body at last. “What are you _doing?_ ”

Sherlock goes still with apparent difficulty, it seems. His body is quivering, wired and very aroused, evidently. He swallows in John’s ear. “John – you started this.”

“If you’re still talking about the kiss in the hospital, that does _not_ count as a blanket excuse to give you license to – to do something like this while I’m sleeping!” John says, annoyance flaring, though it’s in one hundred percent contrast with what his body wants at the moment. 

Sherlock makes an annoyed sound of his own – again, directly into John’s ear. “I didn’t know you weren’t awake, because _you_ took my hand and put it there yourself, so if it’s not to your liking, you have only yourself to blame!”

John’s spurt of annoyance dissolves immediately into shame. “Oh God, did I really?” he asks, aware that his hand is still there on Sherlock’s, both of them holding his cock. 

“You did,” Sherlock informs him. “And I thought you were awake.”

“Sorry,” John says awkwardly. His cock is leaking and twitching within their hands and wanting this rather badly, regardless of John’s head or heart at the moment. 

“Unnecessary,” Sherlock says. Pause. “Do you really want me to stop?” It’s pained; he’s asking because he knows that he should, clearly, but is dreading John’s answer. 

“Not particularly,” John says honestly, and is rewarded with a sound like an actual purr in his ear. It’s immensely arousing, and Sherlock has already started to move his fist on John again, to their mutual relief. John is so hard that he doesn’t think it will take more than a few more strokes. He grips Sherlock’s hand, fucking it faster, turned on by the feel of Sherlock’s erection hard against his arse on the other end of his thrusts. Sherlock is breathing in his ear and it’s warm and that’s good, really good, but then Sherlock’s lips and tongue are on his earlobe and John comes like a rocket launching, trying not to thrash against Sherlock’s chest as his cock jerks and spasms in Sherlock’s tight fist. Sherlock moves to take his hand away, but John keeps it there. “Not yet,” he requests, panting. “Keep touching me, just a bit longer.” He’s always liked that, being held through the aftershocks, as long as it’s gentle, just being stroked a little more as the last pulses of come dribble out. Most of his girlfriends haven’t really liked that, but Sherlock doesn’t appear to be squeamish about his come at all, smearing his palmful of it against John’s cock and caressing it as John comes down from his orgasm. 

Sherlock has gone nearly still now that John has come, but John can still feel him, hard against his body. Perhaps he isn’t sure whether he’s allowed to continue, now that John’s finished. John turns within Sherlock’s arm and puts his mouth on his, simultaneously reaching down into Sherlock’s pyjama pants. He’s never touched a cock other than his own in his life before, but he always knew that if there was one he was going to touch, it was always going to be Sherlock’s. It’s more erotic than he would have thought, and just knowing that Sherlock is this hard for him is strangely moving. Sherlock grips the sleeve of John’s t-shirt and holds himself mostly still, letting John do it. John kisses him through it, generous with his tongue and lips as his hand works over Sherlock’s cock. Sherlock is rigid, seemingly trying not to move, but then John reaches down to tug gently at his balls, then goes back to sliding his fist over his cock. Sherlock makes a desperate sound into his mouth at this and hooks a leg over John’s for leverage, suddenly pushing himself into John’s hand in time with its movements, the tempo increasing sharply and then his entire body stiffens and he breaks free of the kiss to make a sound that’s half hard exhalation and half moan, and then he’s coming, shudders of orgasm wracking through him as the come soaks John’s hand and wrist and the front of his t-shirt. It goes on rather longer than any of John’s orgasms ever have, Sherlock’s teeth digging into his lower lip, his entire forehead contracted. He throws his head back, mouth open and there’s another burst of come, then another. It’s the most intense orgasm that John has ever witnessed another person have and it makes his cock stir with renewed interest just to see it. Finally Sherlock’s body goes limp, and John looks down at the mess between them. He has never come that much at once before, and suddenly he wonders if this is the first orgasm Sherlock has ever had with anyone else. The thought makes his heart clench with something like pain for Sherlock, intense satisfaction that no one else, neither Janine or Irene or anyone else, male or female, has ever got to witness this, and an even fiercer stab of something too sharp-edged to be called joy that it was him. Sherlock collapses forward, burying his face in the crook of John’s neck, hand relinquishing its death grip on John’s sleeve and squeezing around his bicep instead. John completely understands the desire to hide his face just now; that was one of the most intense things he has ever seen happen to another person, so, _so_ private, even with someone he trusts as much as John. “Thank you,” Sherlock pants into his neck. “For not stopping.” He pushes at John’s neck with his face, burrowing closer than ever. 

“Hey, hey,” John says, even more moved by this. “Don’t thank me for that.” He pulls Sherlock’s slackened body to himself and gets his arms around him, kisses Sherlock’s mop of hair until Sherlock recovers enough to lift his face to John’s and then they kiss for a long, long time. The hurry is gone now, the pressure to climax passed, so there’s nothing to prevent this, just lying together and losing themselves in each other like this. After a long while, John says, “Are you all right? Your chest, I mean, that must have been…”

Sherlock shakes his head minutely. “Worth it,” he says. 

“But are you in pain?” John wants to know. 

“It’s minimal. It’s fine.” Sherlock is dismissive, clearly having what he considers more important things on his mind. “John, I – ” he stops, nudges his nose against John’s. 

“Yeah?” Good God, if he’d known Sherlock was a cuddler years ago… John kisses him again, briefly. “What were you going to say?”

Sherlock closes his eyes, as though unable to say this while making eye contact. (Too intimate, John supposes.) “I want you terribly,” he says. 

It’s so unvarnished, so unshielded in layers of Sherlock’s particular games and motivations and things half-hidden that John is taken aback by the sheer directness of it. “I think I’m starting to figure that out, yeah,” he says, his voice coming over gruff. He tries clearing his throat, which seems to be suddenly rather full of emotion. 

“I know it’s too soon, but I never thought – ” Sherlock stops again. “I just – ” 

He doesn’t seem to be able to say what he wants to say, and something in John warns him against drawing it out. It _is_ too soon, but at this point, it’s not really as though they can go back, is it? Pretend it never happened? It should have been put off until John isn’t bleeding internally from Mary’s wounds, Mary’s lies, and it should have been put off until Sherlock is physically healed enough for it, but what are they supposed to do now? It’s happening, as inevitably as John, in a way, always knew in his gut that it would one day. “We don’t have to talk about it now,” he says, and it’s a bit lame and it’s not nearly sufficient to address any of this, but he’s not sure what else to say. He combs his fingers through Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock opens his eyes, looking unusually open and a bit pained in that same way that he’s done off and on since the night he was shot. “It’s going to be okay,” John says, though he’s in no position to make promises. 

Sherlock’s mouth twitches as though he very much wants to say something, but eventually he decides not to and just nods. “Okay,” he says after that, as though in afterthought. There’s a pause. “What happens now?”

“Now we go back to sleep,” John says, aware that he’s sidestepped the real question. 

Sherlock doesn’t let him get away with it. “But after that,” he presses. 

John sighs. “Well, I can hardly make us not do this, especially when I can’t even control myself in my sleep. I just think that we… need to be patient. Go slowly. You know I’m in no fit state for – well, anything. It’s just going to take time to get over that, stop being angry, stop feeling conflicted.”

Sherlock looks surprisingly young with his smooth façade removed. “I don’t mind you angry and conflicted.”

“ _I_ mind me angry and conflicted,” John says firmly. “I don’t want this mixed up in the rest of this mess.”

“But down the road?” Sherlock asks. “Do you think…?” he picks at the sheet between them, his very hesitation speaking volumes. 

“Yeah, I do,” John says. It feels like such a relief to say it at last. “I think this was always supposed to happen, maybe.”

Sherlock finally relents, his face not quite relaxing, but it’s a start. “Then I can try to be patient,” he says. 

***

John wakes up alone later that morning. The shower is running and he presumes that’s where Sherlock is. He thinks over the previous night, feeling that perhaps the worst of all this is over, because when he thinks of Sherlock, he feels nothing but warmth. He realises he’s smiling to himself as he stretches and yawns. It makes no _sense_ , he can’t possibly be falling this hard for Sherlock even as somewhere else in his heart and mind, he still feels all of the horrible things he feels when he thinks of Mary. It’s as though he’s two different people, and frankly, he feels that that particular sort of duality is Mary’s province, not his. The thought of Mary makes him angry all over again and he just doesn’t want to think about her at the moment. Instead, he gets out of bed, peels off his sticky pants with some care as they’ve dried to his skin in places, and goes to join Sherlock in the shower.

“Hello,” Sherlock says, opening his eyes under the stream of water. 

“Hello,” John says, feeling silly and pleased about everything anyway. 

Sherlock observes him closely for a long moment, then says, “I thought I was going to wake up and discover I dreamed it. Or that I hadn’t and that you’d be angry.”

“Not angry,” John says, and Sherlock smiles. They mostly just wash each other and kiss a lot, and that’s more than enough. Afterward, they dry themselves and John changes Sherlock’s wet bandaging, Sherlock’s hands trailing over his hips and arse as he does it, making it hard to concentrate, his erection quite obvious under his towel. Despite their discussion of taking things slowly, this somehow finishes with his cock in Sherlock’s mouth. He tamped down the new round of tape and Sherlock wasted no time in hooking a finger into John’s towel and letting it fall away, all of his rather intense focus zeroed in on John’s bobbing erection. It is nothing short of fantastic despite Sherlock’s touching lack of experience. Enthusiasm can apparently make up for experience, John discovers. This is immediately followed by Sherlock’s cock in his mouth, the bathroom tile hard on John’s knees as he kneels between Sherlock’s thighs and tries to do everything he’s always liked best to Sherlock. He doesn’t know if it’s the first blow job Sherlock has ever had, but (despite long-harboured, particularly deeply-buried fantasies), it’s certainly the first John’s ever given him and he wants it to be memorable. After, Sherlock tells him, thumbs stroking John’s lips, that he’s already learned six new things from John’s “demonstration” and requests a second go later on. John accepts without reservation and goes to dress and make breakfast, grinning all over himself like a total moron.

Even as he questions it, the wash of confusion bubbling up like acid reflux, he forces it down and thinks that things have been so supremely shitty that he deserves _some_ happiness, regardless of the terrible timing. (Though seriously, in all the time he and Sherlock have been together, as friends, that it should finally happen _now_ , just when the rest of John’s personal life has gone completely to shit is infuriatingly typical. It couldn’t have happened some quiet evening back in the days before Sherlock’s disappearance.) Though, even as John cooks, he realises that it was these precise circumstances that pushed them closer again, anyway. The mutual enemy. The shock of the pain and consequent need for care, either physical or emotional. The deep-seated attraction on both sides pushed to the surface at last. No: he can’t even begrudge the timing. It was meant to be all along and was delayed as it is. He refuses to feel badly about it, even if it makes for a rather overwhelming cocktail of emotions boiling through his veins. 

Sometime later, just after noon, Sherlock comes over and sits down next to him on the sofa. He’s got a particular look on his face that means he has something to say, so John closes his laptop. “What’s up?”

Sherlock pulls the memory stick out of the pocket of his dressing gown and holds it silently out to John, his eyebrows lifted in slight question. 

John feels his good mood deflate at once, but he nods, jaw clenching already. There are only two possibilities here. The first option is that the memory stick will contain all manner of sordid details concerning Mary’s history as a career assassin. He still can’t believe that he married someone who chose, on purpose, to become an assassin – he understands killing in the line of duty or to save a life when there are no other options, but to kill willingly, for pay, frequently – it turns his stomach. And the second option is that, as Sherlock has theorised, the memory stick will be empty, making even Mary’s teary request that he not read it in front of her a lie, further proof of her manipulation. John isn’t looking forward to discovering either option, frankly, but he did tell Sherlock that they could read it together today. Might as well get it out of the way, he supposes. 

Sherlock plugs the memory stick into one of the USB ports on John’s laptop and sits very close to him. John half wishes Sherlock would put his arm around him and half wants to tell him not to touch him just now. He can’t help it; he feels intensely prickly concerning Mary and he shouldn’t bristle about it like this in front of Sherlock, who arguably has about as much reason to feel prickly about her, himself. The menu options come up and John reluctantly clicks on the one that will show him the contents of the drive. It isn’t empty. There is only one file, labelled, “John”. John hesitates, then clicks on it. 

Sherlock leans in and they both start to read, silently. It reads: 

Dear John, 

If you’re reading this, I am disappointed in you.  
You don’t deserve anyone’s good faith. 

Mary

PS: See the attached scan on the second page. 

Sherlock reads faster than he does and will definitely be finished by now, so John scrolls through the white space at the bottom of the page to find a scan of a report in print so fine that he has to squint to read it. It’s a chart, but before he looks at it, his eyes go to the logo in the top left corner. _DNA Data Centre_. His eyes stop on the graphic and his stomach drops. He understands. 

The chart confirms it. The top line reads: _David Alistair Sanford: probability of paternity: 98.347%_. John sees his own name underneath that, along with two others, the results not even whole numbers. His hands have gone numb; he’s not even holding the laptop, unaware of Sherlock beside him except for the need to keep his face very, very still at the moment, keep himself like stone. Without a word he pushes the laptop onto Sherlock’s knees, gets up, puts on his coat and walks out of the flat. 

Sherlock lets him go without trying to hold him back, not even saying his name. 

***

It’s been nearly four hours and he’s started to get cold but he doesn’t know what else to do with himself. After walking and walking and walking, hating his fellow pedestrians, hating the traffic, hating the cool wind, hating David Sanford, and above all, hating Mary, he finally turns back in the vague direction of Baker Street and finds himself in Regent’s Park. He finds a bench on the west side of the long arm of the boating lake and sits down. Now that he’s stopped walking, his thoughts crowd even more closely around his head. David Sanford. He should have bloody known. He was far too chummy with Mary for an ex-boyfriend, despite her mild-mannered protests that it was long over and that they were just good friends. Sherlock had known, he thinks, remembering the stiffness between the two of them at the wedding. All right, maybe not that David and Mary were still involved, but certainly that something wasn’t right there. He trusts that Sherlock would have told him _that_ if he’d known, and the distrust and mutual dislike had been obvious. 

He hates to admit it, but he does sort of wish that Sherlock was with him, now. It doesn’t work that way, that the angrier he is with Mary, the more he will punish her by being with Sherlock, but it certainly confirms that he’s made the right choice. This time, he was finally given the choice. He knows it’s the right one. He knows it in his gut. Nonetheless, finding out that Mary was not only cheating on him, but that worse, he’s not even the father of her child, is humiliating and fills him with such a bitter rage that he could tear both her and David Sanford to shreds with his bare hands and smile while doing it. God help him. He is going to implode one of these days – or explode and end up going on a homicidal rampage. 

Somehow it’s not even surprising when Sherlock walks around the bench from behind him and sits down, wordless, several inches away. He doesn’t speak, just sits there with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of the Belstaff and joins John in gazing at the water. They sit that way for a long time, fifteen minutes, perhaps, before anyone speaks. 

“I’m not even going to ask how you found me here.” John keeps his eyes on the water. 

“CCTV. I assumed you would guess.” Sherlock’s profile is unmoving, his eyes narrowed against the cool grey light of the overcast day. 

“Is your brother in on this, then?”

Another minute goes by before Sherlock answers him. “I called him,” he says finally. “After you left.” Another pause. “I was… a bit concerned.”

He doesn’t specify and John doesn’t ask. “Did you know?” he asks abruptly. 

“Know?” Sherlock repeats, sounding startled. His head turns toward John. “John, do you really think I would have kept that from you? Of course I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t _see_?” John can’t help the sarcastic edge. He shouldn’t be taking this out on Sherlock but the anger is leaking out of him at every pore, as though he’s a sieve, unable to keep it contained any longer. 

“No,” Sherlock says, sounding a touch bitter, himself. “I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t see it. I should have.”

“And you didn’t see it in Mary, either,” John says. He shakes his head. “I always thought you were a good liar, but God _damn_ , she has put you to shame.”

“I should have seen all of it,” Sherlock reiterates, still sounding frustrated. “I knew there was something off about her, but Mycroft told me to stay out of it and that he would do his own checking. And after I was shot, I thought it should be your decision, what to do, so I didn’t tell him. He had managed to find out on his own and was furious with me for deliberately keeping it from him. But I know everything now. Which is to say that I know everything that Mycroft knows about her now.”

“Which is to say, everything,” John says dryly. “Go on, then. How much worse can it get?”

“It’s not as bad as it could be,” Sherlock says, though he sounds rather dry, too. “She hasn’t actively killed anyone in four years, which would have changed had I actually died, of course, but I didn’t. The affair was – I’m sorry, John – ongoing. Mycroft was alerted by someone who worked in the genetics laboratory when the paternity test results came up and he has Sanford in custody, you could say. According to him, Mary was planning to leave you for him once she found out she was pregnant. She must have assumed it was his, because – again, according to Sanford, you and she had always used protection and she didn’t with him. Of course,” he adds, “that could easily be Sanford’s own assumption or delusional hope, or Mary could have lied to him. It’s hardly a credible source. We don’t know that that was Mary’s actual plan.”

John feels his jaw clench. He wants to kill them both more than ever, regardless. “I am getting a divorce _now_ ,” he says. “What is Mycroft doing with David?”

“Oh, he plans to let him go after intimidating him a little more,” Sherlock says, “but in a few months he’ll be dispatched.”

“Killed?” John asks, a bit too much grim enthusiasm behind it. Sherlock is probably exaggerating to make him feel better, but the idea is too satisfying to write off as a joke just yet.

“Likely,” Sherlock agrees without a hitch. “Or a particularly unpleasant prison, for life. Guantanamo Bay, perhaps.”

John takes a moment to bitterly relish this, as if it could actually happen. (Of course Mycroft would be able to get someone sent to Guantanamo Bay, despite it being _well_ outside the jurisdiction of the British government. Hadn’t Sherlock told him that Mycroft had worked freelance for the CIA the night John had first met him? But it's hardly as though even the likes of Mycroft Holmes would dispatch an innocent man just because he dared sleep with John's wife. There _are_ limits.) After a bit, he says, soberly, “And Mary?”

Sherlock sighs. “According to Mycroft, we need to leave her in place for now. Mycroft wants you to pretend to forgive her. It’s all about Magnussen now. If we don’t take Magnussen out first, she will certainly go after him again, in Mycroft’s opinion. Magnussen is in Geneva for a high-security UN conference until Christmas Eve, where he’ll be more or less untouchable. After that, it’s open season. Mycroft wants me to do it, or if necessary, you. He has some sort of plan of having you distract Mary while he and I organise a raid, wherein I take Magnussen out in front of as many witnesses as possible so that Mary will back down and go back into so-called retirement.” Sherlock pauses. “I know it’s a… questionable plan at best. Mycroft has something else up his sleeve that he hasn’t fully disclosed, but it essentially boils down to him thinking that Mary hasn’t entirely retired and I think he’s trying to flush her out in a very specific direction.”

John attempts to absorb all of this, but the information is mostly staying on the surface and refusing to be integrated. He feels as though they’re discussing a complete stranger. Possibly because they _are_ discussing a complete stranger. And now Mycroft wants Sherlock to kill someone, in cold blood, not three months after Sherlock nearly died of a gunshot wound himself. John feels an unpleasant shiver whisper down his spine. He feels miserable. (He should have known things were too good to last. It wasn’t even twelve hours, damn it.) 

He can feel Sherlock’s thoughts probing worriedly at him, feels his cautionary, as-yet-unspoken words, his silent attempts to choose something appropriate to say at this point. After a bit, he begins, but trails off. “John…”

It takes him a minute to get his mouth to form words again. “Yeah?” He can feel that he’s scowling and closed-off. He can’t help it. 

Sherlock leans toward him but John tenses and he stops, awkwardly close to John but seemingly not willing to retreat per se. His bearing is rather intense; John can feel Sherlock’s focus radiating onto him like heat. “I told Mycroft that we’re not doing anything unless you’re completely all right with it. You need to know that. No one is going to force this plan on you.”

John raises his eyebrows about to his hairline, still looking out at the lake. “Oh, really.” This, he does not believe for a second. Sherlock, perhaps, especially now that they’re whatever they are, but not Mycroft. 

“I was quite firm on that point,” Sherlock tells him. “I won’t have anything to do with his plans if you’re not in absolute agreement.”

John thinks about this for a bit, then leans forward, his elbows on his knees, face in his hands. “What the hell did I do wrong to deserve this?” he asks bleakly. “First my wife shoots you. Then you both try to tell me it was because I just happen to like that kind of person. Then I find out she’s been cheating on me, with a man she’s been more intimate with than me, who she’s newly _married_ to, and that our child isn’t even mine at all. I had less then _one_ full percent a chance of being the father. And on top of it all, your bloody brother is drawing up some large scale scheme to have you off Magnussen before my pro assassin wife can, when you’ll barely be ready for action by Christmas, and then apparently we’re going to see if we can ‘flush’ Mary out, like a wild animal or a terrorist. Which she may well be; I don’t even _know_. Seriously, where the _hell_ did I go wrong?”

“You didn’t,” Sherlock says. After a moment he adds, “I shouldn’t have said that, about Mary being like that because of you. You didn’t know.”

“I sure as hell didn’t!” John lets go of his face and balls his hands together to prevent himself from hitting something, or Sherlock. 

“I know,” Sherlock says, still sounding apologetic. “John, I – ” He stops. “I do understand, if you don’t…” He tries again. “You said last night that we could go slowly, but I don’t want it to be… a pressure. Something that compromises you, or puts too many demands on you.”

Face still in his hands, John shakes his head. “That’s rich,” he mutters. “ _Now_ you get all selfless.” He hears himself and immediately hates what he said. He sits up and looks at Sherlock, who is looking at the ground. “I’m sorry,” he says, louder. “I’m being such a dick to you. This isn’t your fault. It’s all just so – ”

“I know,” Sherlock says quickly, glancing at him. “That’s why I… and you’ve spent all of your time looking after me, and it’s drained you terribly, dealing with me on top of everything else. It’s not necessary. I can go back to the hospital and let you have some space to deal with this, if you prefer.”

John musters a partial smile. “Stop that,” he says. “Do you know how lost I would be without you right now? It’s the only thing keeping me together. Having something to do, taking care of you, and it doesn’t drain me. It’s what I do. And I want to do it. I want to be with you. It’s all just a _lot_ to have at once.”

Sherlock doesn’t look reassured. “I know,” he says, frowning. “That’s why I thought that perhaps you’re right. That it _is_ too soon, for you. I don’t want to be another thing that you have to deal with.”

John sighs. He can’t really deny the veracity of what Sherlock is saying, but he also doesn’t want to lose the one really good thing that’s going on in his life at the moment. “You’re not backing out of this now, are you?” he asks, a sudden suspicion coming to mind. 

Sherlock gives a small laugh, just an exhalation through his nose. It sounds just a touch wry. “Hardly,” he says. “Not after having waited this long.”

(This long?) John turns his head and looks at Sherlock properly for the first time in this conversation. Sherlock’s face is doing that open, vulnerable, slightly-pained look again, his filters pulled away. It makes John catch his breath. He knew that Sherlock felt something, obviously, and he can admit to himself that he was prepared to take whatever that was and do his best to make himself be satisfied with it, but this… he feels as though he’s finally seeing it for what it is. What’s it’s been all along: Sherlock loves him. Has done for a long time. How long, John doesn’t know, but it’s _Sherlock_ , one of the most demanding people he knows, and he is actually offering to give this up only because he thinks it might be inconvenient for John. That alone is enough to convince John that Sherlock actually does have a notion of what love is, and that he’s entirely capable of it. (Oh, God.) There is definitely no escaping it, then: John feels the sand slide out from under his feet as the undercurrent of his own, inescapable love for Sherlock swells over him and pulls him out to sea. He clutches at the lapels of the Belstaff, well above the bullet wound, and drags Sherlock to himself. Sherlock apparently has no qualms about doing this in such a public spot, happily. He kisses back just as passionately as John is giving it to him, turning to press John back against the bench, their tongues tangling together, and John lets himself fall into it and just _feel_ , drowning in it, in Sherlock’s openness, his unguarded heart. John moves even closer and puts his arms around Sherlock’s back, holding him so tightly that he can feel the beat of Sherlock’s heart even through the layers of his jacket and the thick wool of Sherlock’s coat. He hopes it’s not hurting Sherlock but Sherlock doesn’t seem to care in the slightest. They kiss and kiss and at one point some teens hoot at them and John flips them off without taking his mouth from Sherlock’s for a second. He has no idea how much time has gone by when they finally come up for air, but he’s hard in his jeans and his heart is pounding, his breath short. Sherlock looks dazed and very happy and transfers his mouth to John’s throat, bent low, arms still around him. His teeth find a patch of skin of John’s neck and close in, tongue pressing in afterward, swiping over John’s stubble, lips following, and it’s tremendously erotic. John tries to say his name and has to try twice to get it out. “Sherlock…”

“Mmm?”

“Let’s go home.” John opens his eyes. Sherlock looks discomfited for a moment, so he clarifies. Sometimes even geniuses need things spelled out for them. He raises his eyebrows pointedly and says, “If you keep doing that here, we’re both going to get arrested on public indecency charges, because I’m about to rip your clothes off right here and now.”

A dangerous gleam comes into Sherlock’s eye at this and John thinks, _Oh God, he has a public sex kink_ , but all he says is, “Baker Street, in that case. Quickly.”

John gets to his feet first, pulls Sherlock to his, and the ten-minute walk becomes a five-minute one as John half-drags Sherlock down the pavement, an arm about his waist. Sherlock’s arm is around his shoulder and they’re barely inside the door before Sherlock is assaulting his mouth again, clawing John’s jacket off and ripping open half the buttons on his shirt at the same time. It’s like being caught in a tornado and it’s bloody fantastic, John thinks, marvelling at how undone, how uncontrolled Sherlock seems. All those years of keeping his sexuality behind an absolute rock fortress and now that the dam has cracked, he’s completely unable to contain it. He’d never dared imagine – hope – that Sherlock could be this sensual, his mouth everywhere it can reach as John half hauls him up the stairs before Mrs Hudson can come out and catch them at this. No doubt she’d be over the moon – and smug, on top of it, damn her – but Mrs Hudson and sex are two incongruous thoughts and he absolutely does not want to have the singularly embarrassing experience of having her catch them half undressed and all but going at it on the stairs, so he manhandles Sherlock up the stairs and into the flat, both of them flushed and laughing by time John manages to slam the door behind them. Sherlock pushes him up against the closed door and smiles down at him, predatory and playful at the same time. “You said earlier that I could try again,” he says, not specifying but it’s not as though John’s forgotten the blow job that nearly made his knees collapse in the loo just that morning – though that seems like ages ago now. 

“There wasn’t anything wrong with your first go, but yeah, definitely,” John says a touch breathlessly. He really, _really_ loves being gone down on, and most of his girlfriends, Mary included, have never really been big fans of it. To have Sherlock – one hundred and eighty-three centimetres of sex in a suit, reminding him that John _said_ he could blow him again, as though fearful that John will deny him, would be hilarious if it weren’t so intensely arousing. “Uh – where do you want to – ?”

“In your chair,” Sherlock says immediately. He’s obviously thought about this already. “Take your trousers off and go sit down.” He’s bossy, imperative, and John has to fight back the urge to grin stupidly as he obeys without question. “Take your shirt off, too,” Sherlock orders. “And your socks. Take everything off.”

“Hold your horses,” John says, yanking his socks off and throwing them across the floor. He’s undressing as quickly as he knows how and Sherlock is watching him impatiently, hands reaching out to grab at a sleeve and pull, kicking John’s jeans away. “You could get undressed, too,” John adds as Sherlock all but wrestles him into his chair. 

Sherlock stops. “Would that make it more enjoyable?”

It sounds like a genuine question. John rolls his eyes and gives him an _I can’t believe you’re really asking that_ look and raises his eyebrows. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

Sherlock glances at the mirror over the hearth. “I see your point,” he says, smirking, and begins to strip. 

John has never seen him cheeky like this. For a beginner he’s doing awfully damned well. Unless he’s not a beginner after all, but he’d rather not think about that. (No. He is. He _has_ to be. Something about every single thing he’s done so far has seemed just a trifle novel, a bit unpractised, unfamiliar. John mentally confirms this: Sherlock is a total novice.) His prick is stiffening even further, watching Sherlock undress, flushed dark and swollen, and Sherlock is eyeing it as he removes piece after piece of clothing with necessary care. The shirt sleeves are still difficult for him and John could get up and help him, but he thinks they’re both enjoying how much John is enjoying watching this. 

“I see,” Sherlock says, laying the shirt over the arm of his own chair and raising his eyebrows, eyes on John’s. “We’ll have to do this again properly, when I’m better.”

John leans back and moves his knees lazily apart. “Get down here,” he orders, too turned on to bother about subtlety any more. 

Sherlock braces himself on the arms of John’s chair, bends to kiss him, and gets to his knees with a wince he nearly manages to hide, but before John can say anything, ask if he’s really all right like this, in this position, et cetera, Sherlock has dropped forward and engulfed his cock in one go and John’s words are strangled in his throat, unspoken. All that emerges is a guttural, heartfelt moan, followed by a goodly bit of profanity. His fingers are already clenching the arms of his chair as Sherlock’s lips and tongue slide over his cock. His tongue is particularly wicked; he’s hollowed it into a u-shape, cupping and pressing into John’s cock from below, sliding it back and forth. He moves back to the head and kisses it obscenely, his fist squeezing up and down the length of John’s erection at the same time. John is in absolute heaven. He wants to throw his head back and just wallow in the sensation, but he also wants to look, because the sight of Sherlock’s beautiful mouth at the base of his cock now, which is sunk all the way into Sherlock’s throat, is the hottest thing he has ever seen in his life. It’s _Sherlock_ , and he’s lavishing one hundred and ten percent of his focus on giving John the absolute superlative in fellatio as of his second try, fingers touching all of the exact right places at the right times, sometimes gripping at his hips, or tugging with just the right mix of gentleness and force at his balls, pressing in just behind, then suddenly jerking over his length again while Sherlock lips at his balls. John wants it to never, ever end, and yet at this rate, he’s going to come – and spectacularly at that – right down Sherlock’s throat. He’s groaning unrestrainedly, hips lifting to thrust into Sherlock’s lips and Sherlock is encouraging it, of all things, making pleased noises about it. John’s getting closer, the quiver starting in his thighs, when Sherlock’s fingers release his balls and move back, probing at John’s hole. This is so unexpectedly filthy that a wave of perspiration breaks out on John’s forehead, and Sherlock still doesn’t stop – his long middle finger sinks slowly but deeply into John, his mouth sliding down the full length of John’s cock then, and the combination is too much – John hears himself give a hoarse shout and one of his hands grabs onto the back of Sherlock’s head and clamps down, forcing him to stay exactly where he is, John’s cock halfway down his throat and John comes so hard he nearly blacks out, body and mind suspended in a blank white stretch while he absolutely drowns in pleasure, body exploding outward through his cock and into Sherlock’s mouth. His hips still after the fourth long thrust and Sherlock’s throat rumbles in vibration, his back stiffening, head still buried in John’s lap. John opens his eyes at last and sees that hand that isn’t still inside him has disappeared and knows exactly where it is and what it’s doing. Or was doing; Sherlock is stilling. Sherlock finally pulls his face back and takes inhales deeply, almost gasping, his face flushed red. He lays his head on John’s thigh for a moment as though utterly exhausted, then says, “Come down here.”

His voice is ragged and hoarse and John complies once Sherlock has removed his finger from where it was, sliding onto the carpet and dragging the blanket from the back of his chair with him. They’re on the floor, side by side, and John wrestles the blanket over them. Sherlock has remembered what he likes and is still lazily, gently stroking his cock as they kiss, his own spent and John realises that he didn’t even have a chance to touch it this time. He breaks away and says, “I didn’t get to touch you. Next time, let me do that.”

Sherlock smiles, his pupils still large and dark in his eyes. “I wanted to,” he says. “I was going to, but doing that was a bit too arousing. I couldn’t help it. Couldn’t wait.”

“ _You_ found that arousing,” John repeats, incredulous. His head is only pillowed on his arm but he doesn’t care. “That was the most erotic thing that anyone has ever done for me.”

Sherlock looks surprised. “Really?” he says. He looks pleased. “Good.” He lifts his head, then reaches for the Belstaff, which is on the floor nearby. He pulls it over and stuffs it under John’s head, laying his own on it beside John’s. “That’s better,” he says. “I wanted to do that. I’ve wanted to for a long time. Particularly since your stag do.”

“Really?” John says. “If you had, I probably wouldn’t have protested. I would have known that I should have, but… who knows what would have happened. You thought about it?” He adds, unable to keep from asking, wanting to hear it. 

“A lot,” Sherlock says. He puts his fingers on John’s scar, touching it lightly. “I used to masturbate thinking about it, in fact.”

A hot prickle goes through John. This is incredibly arousing, something he’ll definitely need to think about again, and frequently. “You used to?” he asks, though. “You don’t any more?”

Sherlock shakes his head. “After you got married and the fantasy became impossible, it lost its allure.” He pauses, seeming to be searching for words, then says, “Look, John. I know that I’m… no replacement for Mary. I know I’ll never quite be enough to fill that gap. But I can learn this. How to do this. I can be better than I used to be. I promise.” 

John is startled by this. And this is all wrong and it’s suddenly terribly important that he make that clear. “Sherlock,” he says, his thumb tracing over Sherlock’s bony hip, “you’ve got it completely wrong. This isn’t about you needing to make up for Mary, take her place. You had your own place and she had her own, and I thought that was okay, sort of. I mean, we never really had a chance to see about this happening, with us, but you’re you and she’s whoever the hell she is, and it wasn’t supposed to overlap at all. It still doesn’t. You’re not taking her place; you’re taking _yours_. They’re not related. And whatever you are is enough. You don’t have to be you and also be Mary, somehow. Just being yourself is quite enough. More than enough. I know I’m all over the place right now, but don’t think that just because I’m still angry as hell and massively upset about all the rest of it that I don’t want to be with you, or want this, because I absolutely do. I love you, you know. You do know. You’ve always known that.”

Sherlock thinks about this for a long moment, his eyes on John’s shoulder scar rather than his face. After awhile, his hand comes up to the side of John’s face, fingers splaying through his hair. “I do,” he says slowly. “But you’re in such an emotionally compromised position as it is, I don’t want to make it worse in any way. Obviously this isn’t really my area, but I just want to be sure that this really works, if we’re going to do it now. You’re the one who understands these things, so if you think it’s all right to do it now, then I trust that you know whereof you speak.”

“We already _are_ doing it now, idiot,” John says, with a half-smile. He sighs a bit. “Yeah, I know what you mean. But this really is okay. I want it and you seem to want it a bit – ”

“I do,” Sherlock interrupts, evidently unaware that John was making a small joke at the expense of Sherlock’s obvious interest in pursuing this. 

He can’t help smiling. “I know,” he says, and tries to make it gentle. “So – let’s just accept that it’s happening. Things have been pretty terrible lately and I imagine they’re going to stay that way for awhile. We might as well let ourselves have this, at least.” 

“Logical,” Sherlock says, but John can’t help but think that he looks relieved. He puts his hand on Sherlock’s upper chest and Sherlock covers it with his own and moves it down to rest lightly over the bandage covering his wound, the shot to his inferior vena cava. His hollow vein. “My John,” Sherlock murmurs, his eyes closing. “You heal me. I’ll do my best to do the same for you.”

John feels his heart attempt to swell beyond the capacity of his rib cage at this. A lump comes into his throat and refuses to dissipate when he swallows. “I love you,” he says, tears in his eyes, and he doesn’t even care if Sherlock sees them. Sherlock opens his eyes, takes in John’s face, and closes the space between them, rolling onto John and covering him completely, his mouth on John’s, long limbs settling around him like a cocoon between the Belstaff and the blanket. He repeats the words in a tone so low that John can barely hear them, but he said it and that’s what counts. He holds Sherlock to himself and knows that somehow, at some point, everything is going to be all right. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> I am greatly indebted to the tumblr user wellingtongoose for her/his post titled "How Sherlock Survived His Heart Stopping: A Medical Analysis" (here: http://wellingtongoose.tumblr.com/post/75415111199/how-sherlock-survived-his-heart-stopping-a-medical), which was my inspiration for this story. I also sought and received some medical advice for a few doctors of my personal acquaintance, as well as google's extensive collection of anatomical images and information. :P
> 
> Also! Khorazir created the most beautiful piece of art inspired by this! Go and see it over here: http://khorazir.tumblr.com/post/80703862548/of-beren-and-luthien-today-is-tolkien-reading
> 
> Also-also! Korean translation by ahimsa now available here: http://blog.naver.com/ahimsa93/220034709957

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for Vena Cava by SilentAuror](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3117443) by [gurkenpflaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gurkenpflaster/pseuds/gurkenpflaster)
  * [[Cover Art] for "Vena Cava" by SilentAuror](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4392710) by [Hamstermoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hamstermoon/pseuds/Hamstermoon)




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